Solstice's share of P2P lawsuits

Parents of digital music fans, please note: Summer's official arrival brought another batch of 482 file-sharer lawsuits from the RIAA. The litigation campaign against "music pirates" started a year ago this week, but the question remains about whether these apparent ritual purgings of the most prolific pirates are having the effect the recording industry seeks. "The number of users on Kazaa, still the most popular file-swapping network, has declined somewhat over the past year, while showing considerable seasonal fluctuation," reports CNET, citing analysts. "However, the popularity of other online networks - particularly a newer rival called eDonkey - has grown substantially over that time." Then again, file-sharers are said to be very aware of the lawsuits, now amounting to nearly 3,500. The two biggest impacts of the litigation, according to a CNET source at a company that "seeds" the file-sharing services with fake files in order to downgrade file-swappers' experience, are 1) a lot more swappers downloading but not sharing music on their hard drives (which certainly eats away at the source of all this music, as well as the networks' whole business model) and 2) the most popular service, Kazaa, is losing users to other, lesser-known networks that file-sharers probably see as "safer" or more lawsuit-free.