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P2P veterans sue the Cloud ... for copying their stuff

Man, this is totally different to the RIAA

Google, Amazon, Dropbox and VMWare are on the receiving end of a law suit brought by former P2Ptards who claim that cloud products from the big companies infringe their peer-sharing patents.

Kazaa founder Kevin Bermeister and StreamCast and Morpheus founder Michael Weiss - two pioneers of file-sharing in the early 2000s - have banded together to launch the ambitious law suit from Texas.

Bermeister is Australian and Weiss was based in Miami, but the two have pooled their patents and set up a joint company based in Texas - PersonalWeb. PersonalWeb describes itself as owning "some really amazing patents" available for licensing, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

According to the story, the pair will argue that many of today's enterprise IT products such as virtualisation and the cloud were derived from peer-to-peer technology used in the last decade.

More famous for being accused of a casual attitude to other people's IP - Morpheus and Kazaa were sued by music industry body RIAA in 2004 - Bermeister has turned to the courts to claim that the tech companies violate several of his patents in their cloud computing products, "including content addressable storage and/or distributed search engine technologies". ®

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