That Time Travis Kalanick Was Sued For $250 Billion--CORRECTED
From
MIT's Technology Review:
Travis Kalanick, 25
Internet and Web
Red Swoosh
Travis Kalanick is good at escaping sticky situations. In 1998,he
launched Scour.com with six buddies at the University of California, Los
Angeles. What began as a Web search engine morphed into a popular peer-
to-peer file exchange system with 250,000 simultaneous users trading
movies and music. Everything was looking up until more than 30 media
companies sued Scour for $250 billion for copyright infringement. Scour
settled and eventually sold its assets. Then, in 2001, Kalanick founded
Los Angeles-based Red Swoosh with Scour’s engineering team. They’ve
developed software that streamlines the way content—documents, music,
videos—is moved around on the Internet. Typically, when you request a
file from a Web site, it is delivered from a centralized server. Red
Swoosh’s software continually updates a directory that lists which files
are on which servers and end-user desktops and transfers the file to
you from the closest source, speeding delivery. The scheme also saves
big bucks in server infrastructure for the company that posted the file.
Several media moguls with busy Web sites are now testing his software.
The damages sought were actually $150,000 per infringement but Travis and the gang put the $250 billion figure in the Scour bankruptcy filing as a liability.
Anyhoo, who am I to argue orders of magnitude with MIT?
