Outspoken P2P 'hero' heads for pastures new

NEWS Wayne Rosso, the outspoken head of file-swapping company Grokster and the man who forced an important legal precedent which protects peer-to-peer companies from prosectution, has resigned to take the helm of Spanish peer-to-peer upstart Blubster. Rosso has long been one of the most outspoken executives in the file-sharing world, known for comparing recording industry executives to Josef Stalin and the fight over digital file trading to the Vietnam War protests. But in recent months, he's found himself at odds with the market leadership of Kazaa parent Sharman Networks and the FastTrack file-swapping technology, which his own company originally licensed to launch Grokster. As head of Blubster parent Optisoft, he'll take on Sharman and FastTrack more directly, licensing the fast-growing newer technology to other file-swapping companies in the hope of creating a new giant, he said. "We've got our sights on FastTrack," said Rosso, who held the title of president of Grokster. "We want to knock them off, and we think we can." Rosso, in large parts through flights of well-placed rhetorical excess, has given Grokster a public profile that exceeds its relatively small share of the file-sharing download market. But that profile was solidified when the company won a key legal battle in April, when a federal judge ruled for the first time that companies that offered software tools for file-sharing, as opposed to operating networks directly as Napster once did, were not responsible for copyright infringement that took place using the software. Record labels and movie studios have appealed that decision, but it gave new optimism to previously demoralised peer-to-peer developers. John Borland writes for News.com