Many are writing the battle of YouTube vs Viacom as a classic new media vs old media battle. So the recent news that Viacom tried to buy Youtube prior to suing it for $1 Billion seems to suggest that this is more about business with copyright as the proxy:

There seems to be more and more applications looking to move p2p file-sharing into the cloud. For example Gygan - a propriety application that allows users to upload their own files to Gygan's servers for storage. So far, sound like existing applications that offer cloud-storage; but they also allow users to search though what other people are storing and take copies.

As laws come in to allow the identification of p2p users, one would expect that p2p users (and developers) would move towards systems that seek to make the user anonymous and/or enforce privacy for their users, rather than stop using p2p. Well that happened in France, and now it is happening in the UK...

It is a hard thing to estimate the cost of the possible (if any) loss that companies might get from piracy. The industry argument goes that each copy pirated is a lost sale; yet this seems an over-estimate as there must be people pirating media artefacts who would not consume it is they had to purchase it. A counter argument goes that the pirates are not people who were ever going to pay, so nothing is lost - which also seems an argument too far in the other direction.

I have noted before the difficulty of giving reliable measurements of p2p traffic; so it is with interest (and a pinch of salt) that we come to new figures again showing a decline in p2p traffic. This time the report is from Arbour Networks and reports a decline of over 71% between 2007 and 2009. That sounds significant. So what does that mean re users behaviour on the internet?

Does clamping down on piracy via the law book stop piracy?  It's seems it might not...it just changes form:

There is an old (on the Internet) saying; the web interprets censorship as damage and simply routes round. This is a key point as the internet was designed to route around the damages caused by a nuclear strike - so routing around censorship is child's play. While the technical routing around damage/censorship is one thing, how people respond is not dissimilar;

This is an interesting article worth a read. One of the people behind The Pirate Bay is trying to apply the same ideas they used regarding sharing content to the income side of distribution:

Defining what a network is, is a huge topic.  It is one I engage with to some extent in my research and you can boil a network down to two components - links and nodes.  The beginnings and ends of the network is a more complex matter.  For example with the Internet, it is less one big network and more a series of networks united by common protocols.  (There is a good discussion of mapping networks using Actor-Network Theory in chapter 4 of Murdoch's book Post-Structuralist Geography.  But networks ar

I've been made aware of a new torrent indexing website, TorrentFactory.org - it's interesting as a development as it seems clear that the PirateBay is under severe threat this year - so the question arises; what will replace it?  I don't mean this question in the sense of what will replace it as the the bogey-man of copyright, I mean the question more in a technological sense; where next for torrent indexing.  I mean this beca