Peter Galbavy wrote: My personal reasons for any downloading of audio, specifically, in it's unavailability through retail channels. I keep picking up references to older stuff that has been dumped by the pop-bods many years ago and cannot be bought for love nor money. I may be breaking some law, but in these cases I do not feel a moral problem. If I could find the artist, in many cases I would even pay them the equiv. of the CD price directly. Perhaps the new business models that will have to be rolled out, either by the existing companies or new, will allow for the full back catalogues to be availale to those of us willing to pay - and then my minor infractions can stop.

ACK, same here.

Back closer to topic, networks. P2P is a bandwidth spiral as we all know - more broadband, more sharing. Will it ever slow down ? Not in our career lifetimes I think. Whether legal or not, content is going to be doing this merry-go-round for the forseeable future, and the best we can hope for is to build and maintain the networks while it happend.

While I generally agree, there is a phenomenon that we might want to consider in some years: everyone having a local copy of every movie and music they want to see or hear. For music, this is already possible: some people have thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of files, and more and more get a jumpstart in building their library by massive dumps of buddies hard disks. For movies, terabyte disks are not far away and it's only a matter of time. In other words: as of today a large part of the bandwidth is allocated to building everyone's collection of files. This might gradually change to become bandwidth being used only for incremental updates as huge local file libraries become common place. Michel.