Kazaa (fasttrack) and edonkey are blamed for illegal file exchange and banned. The MS Outlook should be banned because it is heavily used to send spam either directly or from infected windows machines.

Karabas Barabas, Toronto, Canada

Perhaps authorities need to look at the likes of Ebay. There is soooooooooooo much pirated music, films and software on CD, DVD and minidisc. I have alerted them to pirated music on minidisc on numerous occasions but they do nothing. Thing is you are paying on Ebay for counterfeit goods which I feel is even worse than sharing files.

It is also worth bearing in mind that it's not just the music industry that suffers from P2P.

Mark Websper, Margate, Kent

Of course, eD2k itself has never been illegal - and even if it becomes outlaw in US/EU/whatever there always will be country for it to be legal in. Faulty title, to be short.

I bet someone at IFPI has noted that their company has too much money and decided to make some "easy money" from that excess under such handy disguise as pointless fighting with P2P networks. Try "shutting down ThePirateBay.org" next few times - that's cheat code for endless money ;)

Seriously, that's better for eD2k, really: see WinMX -> Winny/Share evolution. And eMule has only recently included "protocol obfuscation" feature... Still a long way to go.

Observer, Moscow, Russia

Waste of time. This will do nothing to fight piracy, and is just an annoyance. This is not the way to fight piracy, and is a laughable joke. In this new age, other methods must be used to fight piracy.

Aram, NYC, USA

Of course increasing sales of legitimate downloads like iTunes and Napster wouldn't have any effect on CD sales at all would they? Since people are no longer forced to buy an entire album to get the track that they want.

How is the 20% decline distributed? across all genres or in particular areas?.

The article is also inaccurate. Closing servers won't lock out 1.3 million users. They will simply be absorbed by another server.

@ JP Seattle
Ubuntu, Gentoo and many other flavours of linux use the P2P file sharing to distribute their, legitimate, software and actively encourage people to redistribute.
One of the world's most popular online games, World of Warcraft, solely distributes its updated content and patches via Torrents ( that's BitTorrent) and a mighty fine way of distributing it is. It does not rely on a centralised server which would result in poor download speeds and unhappy customers, but instead takes advantage of the bandwidth available from multiple peers.

LT, Leicester, UK

I can't just see the parallels between the church ruled state in medieval times and the corporate ruled state(laws) in modern times.

Is another revolution around the corner which will change the way we perceive things?

Personally i think that Music artists must be paid for the hard work they have put in. But on the other hand how much is open to question. File sharing is important, But not at the expense of other people's effort.

May be music industries may be should gain from the fact that "Fortune lies at the bottom of the pyramid" ( read this by C.C. Prahlad.
The pricing strategies that they are following was good for an economies with regular physical delivery of goods. For virtual goods, may be they will have to develop new prices. As these are the goods that are experiencial and hard to produce but easy to reproduce. The die cast is expensive to produce, not the imprints.
Thanks

satyarth, dubai, UAE

"Name one thing you have downloaded that WASN'T questionable or illegal...or didn't violate any intellectual property laws people. Is Bittorrent, eDonkey necessary for legitimate purposes?"

The linux distribution i am using to write this message was downloaded via bittorrent. There is nothing illegal about it (unless you believe the unsubstantiated claims coming from microsoft). The reason the creators of the software wanted it put on Bittorrent? They did not wish to pay extra money for higher upload limits and instead used the bittorrent protocol, whereby other users donate some of their upload capabilities to allow them to distribute the software. So yes, it can be quite useful. For some legal uses (smaller files than bittorrent typically) edonkey has been used in a similar way.

James, london,

What we are actually seeing is a desperate attempt at the old-fashioned music distribution system trying to maintain some sense of relevancy in this digital world.
Not too many years ago Bill Gates proclaimed that all content distribution would be through CD's. If this sounds like idiocy, well it is. The internet has made CDs about as useful as LP records. They're not even a good long term archival format and the industry knows that as well.
If the industries in question would simply give in, put up internet content distribution without that silly DRM at a very reasonable price, then piracy would be relegated to a level where its insignificant anyway, since people would act in a rational fashion and purchase something that is cheaper and faster to get through legitimate channels than through illegitimate ones.

Steve Savage, Tulsa, OK, USA

Use a bit of common sense, people.

How much does it really cost to produce and distribute a music cd or video dvd?

Does everyone really believe that the recording industry and artists live on paper-thin margins? Does anyone really believe that only $.05 of their their $15 cd goes to the artist and $.25 to the label?

Seriously, most artists make their money touring, and the music industry needs to stop charging $15 for a $2 product.

If grocery stores had the same margins as the music industry, a tin of peas would cost $15, a gallon of milk would be $60, and farmers would be billionaires.

Edward McCain, New Orleans, Louisiana

The downing of those servers have little or no effect on the
edonkey network.
the edontkey network has lots of other servers in other countrys and it can run without servers if it needs to.
As of today.. Sep 25th 99% of all connection have been restored.

kobe wild, ontario, Candea

Who knows, maybe one day the music industry will stop tilting at windmills and produce an interoperable, reasonably priced offering that will give users an alternative to file sharing. In the meantime, the can focus on cutting off the hydra's head.

Joe, brussels, belgium

This is bad - I was in the middle of downloading something from eDonkey when I left the house this morning! :-(

JG, london, uk

I predict almost zero real impact. This network is built on many international servers, and it's backed up by a truly peer to peer system with no special servers. The idea that it could be "shut down" is a joke. People will just move to a different server. A matter of a few minutes disruption.

Julian Morrison, Reading, Berkshire

This is a complex issue, on one hand we have the legitimate use of 'sharing' non-copyright content - a freedom given to us by the internet and some excellent programmers. On the other hand we have a greedy idustry that has not woken up to the fact that people now realise how they have been ripped off. Lets face it, we paid for the records, then the CD's and now the MP3's. The music industry has been over charging for years.
If they made their product cheaper and easy to obtain then I am sure file sharing would drop off ... but no they pay lawyers and still try to maintain their status quo .... Why don't they just work out a new business model ???

James, Berlin, Germany

I personally do not have file sharing software installed mainly due to the viruses and other malicious downloads which disrupt the use of installed programs and software.

I do not agree that all music downloads should be paid for since through file sharing the music is introduced into a broader section of the population at no cost to the artist or the recording companies.

We pay for our internet provider. We pay for the hydro to run our processors therefore the media being downloaded is never free as the media giants would have us believe. We pay. We pay dearly.

Record companies could not have reached the population to this extent without peer to peer. Many artist would remain unknown, CD sales would decrease due to lack of free exposure. Peer to peer increases sales for many despite the claims otherwise by reaching a larger market faster.

Big industry trying to dictate to the masses how they should conduct their lives. They will and they do.

M.N., Peterborough,

I'm supprised people still use such P2P networks since my experience of one network a few years ago was that they were littered with spam, virus and porn.

Neil, Carlisle,

Even as a struggling musician myself, I've always considered that if you're trying to make money from something that can easily be copied - then you're in the wrong business. That goes for musicians and record companies alike.

Even if every single record company in the world was made bankrupt due to nobody buying their records, music would still exist.
People would still make music and those people would still find ways of getting their art out to people who wanted to listen, and some appreciative listeners would still be willing to pay/donate directly to the artist, to enable their musical heroes to continue their creative existence.

So in essence, what this is all about is the middle-man complaining that he's no longer needed... diddums!

Joey, Cambridge,

Disabling an internet service merely because some of its users choose to use it for unlawful purposes is wholly improper: unlike as is incorrectly stated in the article, there is nothing inherently unlawful about a system that does no more than allow users to send files to one another: in that respect, eDonkey is no more illegal than e-mail.

The fact that people choose to use a service that is not inherently illegal and can perfectly well be used for lawful purposes (lots of people who want to make files publicly available, for example, do not have the server resources to host it themselves) is not conceivably a proper reason to stop anybody from using the service for any purpose at all.

Those who have made this improper decision have a grossly deficient grip on reality.

James E. Petts, Burnham, England

CRITICS!...Sure ...IT isn't illegal itself...but....Come on! If your download wasn't illegal, for example, you'd just go to the company's website- click Support...and download "Drivers, Software, etc"... Or, for instance...go to the website and download the file directly. Name one thing you have downloaded that WASN'T questionable or illegal...or didn't violate any intellectual property laws people. Is Bittorrent, eDonkey necessary for legitimate purposes? And, anyone who knows the music industry should do a double take on "them" making billions, when most artists nearly go bankrupt at some point in their life. Think about it...if a musician makes $1mil of their album...that money has to last 30 years...if you didn't like it, you wouldn't download it. And if you did like, you probably downloaded it, and didn't buy it. That's what affects multiple industries today. Theft. Period.

JP, Seattle, WA, WA

What about the nature of decentralised filesharing is 'murky'? It's only murky if you don't understand it properly, and if you don't understand it properly, be careful about writing stories on it.

@frank - I don't think the solution is technical. I think the solution is philosophical, on the part of record companies. What if they were happy to say 'Of all the trillions of music files in the world, we get paid for a quarter of them' - that's an enormous base for making money. That's not how they want to do it. they want 100%, even though that's next to impossible, and getting less achievable every day.

Ben, Dookie,

Why do you assume (in your title headline) that all or even most file-sharing on e-Donkey is illegal?

Steve, New York, NY / USA

It's about time the record companies/artists stopped complaining, after all they still make billions and anyway they bought this on themselves by overcharging in the first place.
Hopefully another file sharing site will start to fill the gap.

tony, london, uk

This will hold them up for about 24 hours. The solution to internet piracy is technical, not legal.

Frank Upton, Solihull,

Illegal? Why is it illegal? Who says it is? This is brainwashing.

mark, barcelona, spain

The title is misleading; the eDonkey network has not been illegal at all, otherwise it wouldn't have been so hard to shut down individual servers.

Matt, Wuerzburg, Germany