Its kind of strange, after those articles came out and I tried gnutella, there were very few people downloading from me (it was shocking, what happened to the freeloaders!!?!?!), by now people probably came back but as downloaders rather then uploaders. It almost seemed like the network was slow for a moment there.

Decentralized and anonymous? Things wont get better until we no longer have to be anonymous, or hide our identity. Hopefully the future will be about reputation, because that is something that is more important to artists musicians programmers writers and others in the creative arts. This way artists can sell their work through gnutella and gain a reputation and then have redistributors (in the form of gnutella clients) bidding to redistribute and sell their work because of its popularity or need.

No one here in my honest opinion is arguing that by distributing copyright material that they are not breaking the law, no reason to call people names. No one said laws are perfect either, or are not corrupted, so lets not leave that to assumption.

Copyright law as used to control the distribution of information is wrong, no matter what that information be, it is no better then preventing someone from giving a speech about corrupt politicians, or about problems in politics. Look at where this law has landed people like Dimitry whom to this day is still sitting in jail, for being an owner of a software company in russia and having written the software that decrypts Adobes format. What happens he comes to the USA gives a speech about their encryption and he gets arrested by the FBI, all in the name of copyright. The australian government had someone remove their book about government corruption from the book shelves that showed evidence in the form of government documents that were copyright by the government, and the government had those books removed because he violated their copyrights. Their laws in that reguard are more strict then ours, but ours is heading that direction.