News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Perhaps The Copyright Industry Deserves Some Credit by derleth on Sunday November 13, 2011 @05:37PM (#3232029)
The P2P world is just full of unintended consequences:

How litigation only spurred on P2P file sharing: http://www.itnews.com.au/News/279763,how-litigation-only-spu...

Discussion: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3227844

In summary, as the penalties for filesharing increased, filesharing was pushed further into the underground, and filesharers adopted protocols like Bittorrent that are more difficult to kill with a court order than Napster was.

Re:Perhaps The Copyright Industry Deserves Some Credit by JoshTriplett on Monday November 14, 2011 @04:34AM (#3233455)
BitTorrent seems quite awful from that perspective. For quite a while, torrents required a centralized tracker to coordinate operation, which provided a single point of failure. Even now, with trackerless operation, BitTorrent has no directory or search protocols, no privacy protection or built-in anonymity, and otherwise makes it trivial for anyone to obtain a full list of IP addresses downloading any given torrent.

I wouldn't call BitTorrent "underground" or "difficult to kill" at all. For that, you'd probably want something like Freenet or GNUnet.