File sharing: Here to stay

Dawn C. Chmielewski in the San Jose Mercury News: Squeeze here -- and file sharers will just go there. Prescient. Excerpt:

The recording industry last week began applying the squeeze to a half-dozen file-swapping companies in the United States, sending two-page cease and desist letters with an unambiguous warning: You're next to be sued. ...

The letters triggered a flurry of desperate talks. And you can predict, with a good deal of certainty, that some of today's most popular file-swapping services will be taken over or simply shut down.

But here's one thing a fresh round of lawsuits will fail to do: end file-sharing. Just as Napster was replaced almost overnight by Kazaa, and Kazaa was eclipsed by BitTorrent and BitTorrent was overshadowed by eDonkey, there'll be another contender, say Shareaza, waiting in the wings.

Naturally, the recording industry's trade association doesn't see it that way. ... [But] The painstaking redux of iMesh demonstrates how unlikely it is that the current crop of companies will make the transition to legitimacy. ...

File-swapping, as a social phenomenon, is here to stay. The average number of people logged on to these networks, at any given time, now approaches 7 million in the United States -- more than double the audience of just two years ago, according to BigChampagne Online Media Measurement in Los Angeles.

Music industry executives will concede, when pressed, that a generation of people who grew up downloading free music on Napster, Kazaa or DirectConnect may be lost.

But it hopes that the junior high set will grow up knowing that exchanging songs or movies or software from illicit peer-to-peer sites is wrong. Perhaps they're on to something: My 13-year-old son has his own iTunes account and readily lectures his friends about the evils of stealing music.

But if his peer group is any indication, he is in a distinct minority.