Platformonomics - Mind the Bathwater

Platformonomics - Mind the Bathwater: "The unanimous Supreme Court ruling on Grokster bodes mighty poorly for companies whose primary purpose is to facilitate music piracy through peer-to-peer file sharing. My out-on-a-limb investment advice: this might not be the best place for your retirement nest egg. Getting paid to propagate spyware while encouraging people to pirate music never was a great business model and the legal risk now probably outweighs any upside.
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I do however hope that peer-to-peer doesn’t get relegated to the dustbin of history along with Grokster and its cohorts. Peer-to-peer has gotten a bad name by association but there is much more to peer-to-peer than just pirated media. It is important as an application topology. Nodes on the Internet can talk directly with one another and don’t have to be mediated by a server or other central control point. The Internet can be a pipe as opposed to a destination. Applications like Groove and Skype show the positive side of peer-to-peer. As developers continue to refine firewall and NAT traversal which is the biggest challenge with peer-to-peer applications today, you’ll see more and more of these direct connections. "