P2P service shut down

Grokster, the file-sharing service that played the "title role" in the Supreme Court case decided last June, has agreed in a legal settlement with the RIAA to stop distributing its P2P software, many tech-news outlets report. Illegal file-sharing probably won't be affected much by this and similar shut-downs, however, because "millions of people already have the Grokster software on their computers, and the company can't stop them from using it to get copyrighted songs free from other Grokster users," the Wall Street Journal reports, and file-sharers have also migrated to other services "to trade music online, notably BitTorrent, Gnutella and eDonkey." The Journal cites numbers from file-sharing consulting firm BigChampagne showing that "an average of 6.7 million people in the US were file-sharing at any given time in September, up from 4.7 million a year earlier. The Supreme Court ruled last June against P2P services' promotion of copyright infringement (here's my coverage of the decision). And here are CNET, the San Jose Mercury News, and Britain's The Register on this week's development.