In July, the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America sued Scour, claiming that Scour Exchange, as the file-swapping service is called, contributes to copyright infringement.

Rodrigues, of course, denies this claim. Scour began two years ago as a college project, a search engine, nothing more. "We were on broadband connections in the dorm rooms in UCLA, and once our Web pages moved a little bit faster, what did we want to do online?" he asks. "Typically, we wanted digital music and multimedia content. So we built a search engine to find that."

Rodrigues says Scour has reached out to the entertainment industry with the goal of creating a business model that serves copyright-holders as well as consumers. But trying to balance these two forces has already proven difficult and, at times, confusing.

During the week of July 20, you had meetings scheduled with BMG and other record labels -- then the RIAA and MPAA sued. What happened? Did the lawsuit come as a shock?

Well, we had 27 plaintiffs in the lawsuit against us, so that was obviously a ball that got rolling before we were served. But from our perspective it was a surprise. We came with a fundamentally different philosophy to these guys and we said we really want to work out a business solution because there's this huge consumer demand here that it only makes sense to harness. That was our intention, and we would have preferred to sit down and work out a business relationship and work out a business strategy. But litigation was their approach -- we just hope it's part of the negotiation process. We hope they'll meet this consumer demand.

After all, our intention wasn't to be antagonistic and launch a wholesale attack on the industry. Rather, we think we've created this great technology that's in its infant stage, and that there's this huge potential to marry the technology with the content, and even prior to the lawsuit that was our intention. We're continuing down the same track; we want a business relationship. We think that's a better solution than any solution that's going to be imposed by the courts or Congress.

Are you still meeting with them or have things chilled?

We have ongoing discussions with a number of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, both on the music and motion picture side.

Who?

We're talking to all the major record labels, but again those are ongoing discussions and there's really nothing substantive to announce right now -- but I do believe we're making progress.

Then you're both fighting and hoping to make up at the same time?

There are two tracks that are going on. From the legal perspective, we think we did a lot of homework before we launched the product, and we made sure we launched a product that was legal. At the same time, we plan to have ongoing discussions with these companies. We think that makes the most sense.

Have your usership numbers grown since you were sued?

They've increased substantially, particularly after the Napster hearing.

By how much?

Well, from before the lawsuit to a week after, we grew our user base by 100 percent. Currently, there are about 70,000 users online sharing almost 5 million files at any given time. We've had about 2.5 million downloads of the application.

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