File Sharing Moves En Masse To The Darknet; Good Luck Shutting That Down
6 March 2012, by Mike Masnick (TechDirt)
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120305/03504817977/file-sharing-moves-en-masse-to-darknet-good-luck-shutting-that-down.shtmlfrom the the-industry-loses-another-generation deptIt's not like this wasn't easily predictable, but as the entertainment industry has "succeeded" in taking down Megaupload and continues to move against The Pirate Bay and others, anyone who's followed this space had to have known that file sharing would just move one step further underground.
We've seen the same thing after every single "victory" against file sharing since Napster was shut down.
Each time, it moves to a system slightly more underground and more distributed.
The early ones were still easy to takedown but as they get further underground, it just becomes worse for the industry (and makes it that much harder to win back those users).
The latest news is that there's been massive uptake of a growing number of anonymous, decentralized file-sharing tools.
As is pretty typical in these "shift" periods, it's still not clear which systems will "win" out over the others, but the leaders are starting to emerge.
The Torrentfreak article above mentions players like Tribler and RetroShare.
People in our comments have been discussing both, as well as Ares Galaxy.
Who knows if any of these apps are actually any good, but it seems pretty clear that people are continuing to file share -- they're just finding ways to do so that are even harder to track down and stop.
How long until the legacy entertainment industry starts publishing articles about these evil anonymous, decentralized file sharing systems and demanding new laws against them?
