File-sharing unabated

File-sharers may think I'm talking about Kazaa, whose parent Sharman Networks has complied with an Australian federal court order in an interesting way. Instead of adding a filtering system that blocks copyrighted music, as ordered, Sharman has only "cut off Australians' access to the Web site from which the file-swapping software Kazaa can be downloaded," CNET reports (for more detail and file-sharers' discussion, see P2P news site Slyck ). But what I'm really talking about is a USATODAY column that pretty much nails the current reality where piracy's concerned. An illustration: Columnist Andrew Kantor cites the big news last week that BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen has agreed with the film industry to "go legit" - no longer let people search for pirated content (via "torrents," or "pointers to files available for downloading) on his site. The only problem is the workarounds, the many BitTorrent-indexing sites, among them Torrentspy, where "141,651 torrents available. Each represents a song or a movie or an image or a piece of software. And Torrentspy isn't the largest" (Kazaa traffic was long ago surpassed by BitTorrent and eDonkey, and there's speculation in Slyck the company no longer even has the resources to do the software upgrade the court ordered). Anyway, the music industry now views CD-burning to be a bigger threat (see my 8/19 issue).