It seem a new study has been released by some researchers that highlight flaws in the current models used by the commercialy operated filesharing networks.
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2025&jsessionid=a8302b52f61f1682f3b6"Although the early use of P2P networks was for digital piracy, P2P networks are increasingly being used for legitimate content distribution, including music, video and software," writes Kartik Hosanagar, a Wharton professor of operations and information management, in a recent paper on P2P business models. "For example, Grooveshark, rVibe, We7 and iMesh are firms that use P2P networks to distribute music to users. The music is licensed from the music labels, the files are distributed from users' machines and the P2P firms provide software and billing. A number of technologies have also emerged to prevent piracy in P2P networks. As a result, distribution of digital products through P2P networks is likely to become more prevalent."
Still, Hosanagar says that these new commercial outfits need to tweak their business plans. He predicts that they will make more money if they are savvier about pricing content and about paying their customers to share it. In "Dynamic Referrals in Peer-to-Peer Media Distribution," Hosanagar and two co-authors at the University of Washington, Yong Tan and Peng Han, create a mathematical model of the ebb and flow of supply and demand on a peer-to-peer network. Their model suggests that file-sharing firms should often pay high fees to users who provide content to other users -- sometimes higher than the retail price of the file itself -- and that they should vary these referral fees and their prices according to the demand for particular files. (The three scholars have also recently completed a related paper on the topic titled, "Diffusion Models for Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Content Distribution: On the Impact of Decentralized, Constrained Supply.")
Theres plenty of discussion material in this news article and its well worth a read to see what sort of deals are being brokered with arists and labels, maybe one day some system of fair and equitable renumeration for those doing the creativity will be settled upon but for now we can only sit and watch as the anti file sharers play underhand games and peddle influence with unhelpful propaganda and the filesharers create more secure and powerful tools to match the efforts of their enemy, a bitter war of attrition thats been going on for the last 7 years at least is still continuing, will any of us see common sense take hold and responsible and honest debate take place, for now the answer sees to be a stark no.
