War On Internet Piracy Suffers Setback

In the wake of civilization the more information the better.Whatever devicies we invent will ultimately go to the survival of the fittest.

Do I think file sharing is inappropriate?

Heck no, every single page you visit here is a file.

But the files we visit on A2K are not protected by the copyright laws. Files being shared on KazaA, Morpheus and the like, are often pieces of performing art that require payment of royalties to performers and/or to the copyright owners (recording companies).

I know, that's the distinction I seek to make. There are many files that are perfectly legal to share. There are many perfectly legal applications for P2P programs.

Violating copyright laws is wrong, sharing files is not.

Absolutely agree. But it is very uneasy to control which files exactly are being shared. I have seen statistics on the KazaA desktop: sometimes more than 2 million files are available for sharing in every particular moment. Since Morpheus, KazaA and the like do not have moderators that would control the contents, abuses are inevitable.

Abuse is inevitable even without technology. P2P software distributers can't be moderators. They do not have this authority.

Such moderators exist. They are called police. Kazaa purposefully does not retain control of thier service bacause if so that lawsuit would have shut them down, even if they made an earnest attempt to combat piracy (which they don't).

As to those statistics the files shared on Kazaa are not always copyright infringements. I have distributed software and code through P2P that was mine to distribute. I suspect that arounf 90% is a copyright violation but the fact remains that P2P is useful and has many perfectly legal uses. The legal use should not be ended due to the illegal use.