Grokster and Aimster are history. Napster has gone legit. And the media maelstroms that swirled around two separate waves of music file sharing litigation have now completely dissipated. But hundreds of lawsuits, thousands of takedown notices, and millions of dollars later, victory for the content industry in the war on P2P remains elusive. Illegal music file sharing, notwithstanding the popularity of legal download services like iTunes, continues by all accounts at a robust rate, with The Economist reporting recently that for every one song that is legally purchased, about twenty are illegally downloaded. For organizations like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), this is a devastating statistic not only because it signifies a wealth of lost revenue, but also because it signifies intractable regulatory failure. It seems that no matter what the entertainment industry does to try to stop them, pirates just won't behave.
What corporate rights owners might initially have conceived as an unwelcome but remediable interruption of a viable business model has so radically altered the landscape of content distribution over the last decade that it now seems impossible to imagine a world without online file sharing. Conceding its own early misrecognition of the scope and nature of the P2P phenomenon, the RIAA acknowledged publicly a few years ago that illegal file sharing is better approached as a problem to be managed than as a war to be won. Since the birth of Napster in1999, corporate rights owners have attempted to regulate file sharing aggressively at three discrete points of intervention: the content level, the network level, and the user level. My talk will explore how and why the entertainment industry has mismanaged the regulation of P2P at the content and network levels.