Scour Inc. was the lookup engine for multimedia on the Internet, and provided Scour Exchange, an early peer-to-peer file exchange service. Scour was founded by 5 students (Vince Busam, Michael Todd, Dan Rodriques, Jason Droege & Kevin Smilak) from either a Computer Science Dept. of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1997. It enter a spot weak inside 1999 whenever Michael Ovitz, the previous Disney executive bought just about a quarter of its shares.

Company History

A company's early products were an SMB search engine and Scour Media Professional, the Windows application to download files from SMB shares. A lookup engine would probe IP addresses for publicly divided up files then stock the two for download by more users.

Inside 1998, the company developed the web search engine as well, crawling the World Wide Web for links to multimedia -- audio, video & images.

Inside 1999 Scour received an investment from Michael Ovitz and the Yucaipa Company -- an investment arm of the billionaire Ronald Burkle. Together, the aggregate investment represented a controlling part in the company. Fallowing a investment, Scour expanded around terms of product offerings & personnel. the company launched a software package known as MyCaster which allowed users to stream audio over a network, optionally mixing mike input sustaining an MP3 file straightaway.

Faced by having a increasing popularity of Napster, Scour developed a competing peer-to-peer service known as Scour Exchange. Unlike Napster, a Scour computer software supported cd & images additionally to only audio files, & integrated a lot users into 1 network. A company likewise attached its site promotional materials to a Scour Exchange software system & attempted to leverage its web & SMB indexes in providing extra research outcomes inside the Scour Exchange application.

In the summertime of 2000 the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and a National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) brought a case against Scour, alleging infringement of copyright. Despite Scour's declarations of innocence, a company was non suspire to raise money to prove my point operations, placed murder virtually all of its staff inside September of that month & declared bankruptcy, to protect itself from either a cause, shortly later on. A company's plus went higher for auction &, as punishment the bidding war, everthing plus were purchased by Centerspan Communications of Portland, Oregon in late December of that year.