File-Sharing's Cloudy Future

By Peter Suciu
TechNewsWorld

"Instead of misguided legislation, we need to create incentives where there can be a business model that pays the content owners and provides the consumer with a way to get the content," said EFF staff attorney Julie Samuels. "With this, people are getting paid for what they do, and people can get legal access to what they want."Whether the cloud will provide that business model is far from certain.Last month Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, who is facing charges in the United States for engaging in digital piracy, announced that he would relocate a new version of his site, Me.ga, outside the United States.

The belief was that this would free him from coming under fire by U.S. law enforcement, but Gabon -- which controls the ".ga" domain -- has already suspended it. This comes after other torrent and file-sharing sites have been shut down by local ISPs. The Pirate Bay, a high-profile sharing site, has been banned or otherwise blocked in a dozen nations including Sweden, the UK, the Netherlands, Finland and Ireland.

Still, file sharers are trying to stay one step ahead of the law, oftentimes with users hiding their IP-addresses as a response to antipiracy initiatives.

"What we've seen are that the efforts to block peer-to-peer file sharing, even as it moves to cloud computing, 

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