File-sharing Goes Social
http://www.shirky.com/writings/file-sharing_social.html

The RIAA has taken us on a tour of networking strategies in the last
few years, by constantly changing the environment file-sharing systems
operate in. In hostile environments, organisms often adapt to become
less energetic but harder to kill, and so it is now. With the RIAA's
waves of legal attacks driving experimentation with decentralized
file-sharing tools, file-sharing networks have progressively traded
efficiency for resistance to legal attack.  
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The RIAA has slowly altered the environment so that relatively
efficient systems like Napster were killed, opening up a niche for
more decentralized systems like Gnutella and Kazaa. With their current
campaign against Kazaa in full swing, we are about to see another
shift in network design, one that will have file sharers adopting
tools originally designed for secure collaboration in a corporate
setting.