The RIAA and their lawyers have served the fatal blow to Kazaa and they are sitting back enjoying the kill. Kazaa may be in triage but mark my words the network has suffered a blow so severe it will not survive.
The question is now which P2P application will be next. The developers of these tools are learning many valuable legal lessons adapting their programs to further shield them from the long arm of the RIAA lawyers.
Those that share files are just going to go deeper underground. Recently I was at an event, in which I was the old man in the group and I started asking those that were their if they were using P2P and many said no. But they followed up with the fact that a large majority of people are trading hard-drives. So instead of surfing the net they plug in a portable 250 meg hard drive and download 50,000 songs. This is the longtail that the RIAA will never be able to stop. [NYT]