Sigh... I write one of my overly verbose replies, and end up 3 steps behind the conversation. Doh!
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But breaking down one single gnutella client of many others does result in no advantage for RIAA at all. Gnutella can't be controlled as far as we know yet. Gnutella's strength is the decentral topology, open protocoll (!) and the variety of clients.
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But breaking down a Gnutella client
does do the RIAA good.
First off, why on earth would they stop at just one? If they can do it once, then all the rest fall like dominos - the precedent will have already been set.
Second, the RIAA would be able to effectively terrorize whatever clients hope to fill the void into non-existance. I know
I'M not going to write a client, because I can't afford a legal tangle with the RIAA. I'm going to assume most other devs are the same way.
Third, they won't be able to kill Gnutella directly. I completely concur. But they don't HAVE to. They will work to keep it from becoming popular. How do you do this? Kill the popular clients. While we may be savy enough to find a new client and move on, the general populus isn't so fortunate. And an unpopular peer-to-peer file sharing network is a pretty empty peer-to-peer file sharing network. And that just plain sucks. And sucking sucks. And... oh wait.
I'm scared of the day the RIAA decides to start sabotaging the gnet - denial of service requests, corrupt files mimicing useful content, etc. Or (even worse) creating their *own* client to peddle to the masses... [shudder]
On a completely different note, is there another forum we should move this discussion to? It's sounding less and less like a feature request.
That, or we could just agree to let the topic die a noble death. ?