Where do news groups fit into this issue?
Seems to me newsgroups, and I'm thinking of the binary groups here obviously, have been around well before Napster. The sheer volume posted daily to these groups is enormous.
I've not seen yet any mention of news groups in any article... is it small potatoes compared to the P2P apps. Clearly, getting downloads takes a bit more skill than P2P.
Newsgroups are a leechers best friend.
Newsgroup usage is growing. The one complication with newsgroups is the ability to put material together. That's not so much the case for music or music videos, but if you want to play some of the stuff you have to have codecs. (Not that you can't find them in the binary groups themselves. This isn't just a problem with the recording industry. Why don't they ask the gaming community about the download problems.