The now-dormant file-swapping technology will relaunch before March as a paid service. Scour's new owner, CenterSpan Communications Corp., made the announcement Thursday (12/14). The company has yet to set a price for the service.

Said Centerspan spokesperson Keith Halasy: "The world is changing. There are not the opportunities that there once were for the download of free content. It's been shown that content holders won't accept a free model… Any service [that] provides that type of free distribution and access will suffer the same fate that others have been suffering...millions in lawsuits."

CenterSpan, which acquired Scour's assets in a $9 million bankruptcy auction earlier this week, plans to use the technology to swap movies and smaller files. The newly designed Scour will feature digital rights managment elements, making Scour's former application obsolete.

CenterSpan is currently testing the new service, which is known as C* and combines Scour's peer-to-peer file-swapping technology with CenterSpan's "Socket" programming, which it has already utilized in online gaming.

While potential investors will have an opportunity to preview C* in January, no release date has been set.