The Grokster decision made filesharing companies vulnerable. The court ruled that they can be sued if they encourage people to share copyrighted material was a great victory for Hollywood, and was believed to be the end of filesharing by some.
But now, one year later, peer-to-peer technologies flourish more than ever.
P2P traffic is rapidly growing, and new services and implementations appear on a weekly basis.
Tom McInerney, co-founder of Guba.com, a video site that just teamed up with Warner Bros. to distribute TV shows and movies said in a Mercury News article:
“Shutting down peer-two-peer networks was like taking a half-course of antibiotics every six months. It just led to the evolution of more decentralized networks that are more efficient and more difficult to shut down.”
He’s right, peer-to-peer traffic is extremely adaptive, flexible and therefore hard to stop. The internet evolves, boosted by the web2.0 hype and clearing the path for even more social networking oriented p2p platforms.
BigChampagne Chief Executive Eric Garland stated:
“The social networking aspect of the Internet is continuing to blossom and no landmark court decision or watershed event changes that.”
I predict a bright future for filesharing and online media…
