CNN has a story on the obvious way to route around the RIAA lawsuits against Napster, Kazaa, etc. — smaller, private file sharing networks.
These private file-swapping networks have surfaced just as the music industry has been granted dozens of subpoenas seeking the names of those who trade copyrighted material on popular services such as Kazaa, Imesh, and Gnutella.
The private networks are open to smaller groups of perhaps 20 to 30 people who liberally share music, television shows, movies and computer programs. Members of such networks believe they can avoid legal consequences because their identities and actions are masked with the same technology used to protect online credit card transactions.
Why not just take this idea a step further? A 200mb external hard drive goes for about $330 or less these days. Find five or 6 friends, put up $60 or $70 apiece, have someone partition the hard drive into separate areas for each individual, and then mail the hard drive across the country from one friend to the next.
Much higher bandwidth (this would be an excellent way to deal with large video files), more files, nobody sniffing packets looking for illegal activities. What’s not to love?