Is it the late 1990's all over again? Remember in the 90's when the music labels took Napster to court and put the company out of business... it was hailed as a win against digital music piracy. Only month later new applications like Morpheus and Kazaa emerged which have proven impossible for the labels to shut down due to their lack of a centralized server.
So here we are 5+ years later and with broadband penetration on the rise, sharing movies today is as easy as it was to share music 5 years ago. So when the movie studios looked at the hub of digital movie sharing, Suprnova, I hoped that the companies would seek to find a way to turn Suprnova into a legitimate operation. Instead the MPAA has shut down Suprnova and other BitTorrent sites and again it has been hailed as a victory over movie piracy.
Sometimes it is better to deal with the devil you know rather than the devil you don't, because I expect the P2P community to come out with brand new file sharing applications this year that will make the MPAA whish they had a centralized source to deal with. There has already been some hype around an application called eXeem, which is supposed to in essence reproduce the Suprnova experience, but in a decentralized fashion.
The game of "cat & mouse" between the content owners and those interested in sharing content will not end due to lawsuits... it will end when consumer needs are being met and when the cost associated with stealing content is greater than the cost associated with purchasing content.
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