Its an interesting exercise (that I'm sure programmers play all the time) trying to work out just how legislation could be drafted that would close down p2p clients such as LW - if you targeted he company it'd be very easy for the company to close and reappear with a new name so fast users would notice nothing except a change of logo - if you target users the best you could hope for is a few long drawn out cases targetting 'excessive' sharers (which might not even result in wins for the prosecution) - if you target ISPs you might have a chance - the ISP could identify the 'signature' of individual p2p programs and automatically block them but I'd bet good money that long before the action started everyone would have 'upgraded' to new versions that have constantly changing signatures that are very much harder to identify and block

the threat to close down LW is so ill informed its hilarious - the stable door is open, the horses have bolted, and they've bred like rabbits

the real clincher though in terms of trying to legislate against p2p (and the reason RIAA hasn't tackled it) is that the attempt is probably doomed before it starts - its like the philosophy 101 exerecise of trying to define what a 'game' is - no matter how you try every definition ends up including things that clearly arn't games and/or excluding things that clearly are games

the biggest threat to p2p is not quixotic legal initiatives but (as above) gnutella spam making the network clumsy and fragile

bad_vlad