Scour Won't Be Free Anymore

After Scour, Inc. pulled the plug on the service last month, the new owners of Scour say that when the service relaunches sometime around March of next year, netizens will have to pay to use it. CenterSpan Communications, who recently acquired Scour, say the move comes as a reaction to the notion that "content holders won't accept a free model."

Recent court battles with MP3.com and Napster have proven this notion, and the company says the new Scour will have digital rights management technologies built into it.

Beta testing for the service, dubbed C* (pronounced C-Star), has already begun, and the company plans to show it to potential investors at the beginning of the year. The software is a child of Scour's peer-to-peer networking and CenterSpan's "Socket" technology the company currently uses for online gaming.

For more information read the article over at CNet.