File-swapping software seemed in peril a year ago when the U.S. Supreme Court gave the entertainment industry a legal bullet: Its ruling reopened the door for lawsuits over programs used to share music, movies and other copyright files.
The Supreme Court, reversing lower court rulings, said developers of such programs could indeed be held liable for unauthorized sharing by their users — if the technology companies were somehow encouraging customers to steal music and movies.
Yet a year later, peer-to-peer, or P2P, sharing continues to thrive, with firms behind favorite applications such as eDonkey, LimeWire, Morpheus and Kazaa, among others, still in business.
Although the threat of litigation did force the operators of BearShare, WinMX and i2Hub to shut down, the number of people using file-sharing services has gone up.
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The p2p developers seem to be getting wiser…anyone now notice the “copyright warnings” on most major p2p apps? I think that is so they can say that they at least “discouraged” their users from sharing copyrighted material….of course it is only a smokescreen
But it is one point that plays well into the Supreme Court ruling of not encouraging users to infringe copyright.
I think the best idea is oepn source p2p apps so these networks can continue to work after the parent companies disappear.