There is quite a lot of activity behind the scenes in the P2P world. This ranges from developers stopping development to others getting ready to quit and trying to salvage some value before closing down or converting. Publicly known news is starting to trickle out in a report from the Wall Street Journal ("Grokster Seeks Deal With File-Sharing Upstart [Mashboxx]") covered by SiliconValley.com. Mashboxx founder Wayne Rosso is a former Grokster CEO. Grokster is headquatered in Nevis, West Indies, which doesn't seem to be helping them.

P2P industry changes started with the Supreme Court decision. Now the Supreme Court didn't say Grokster and Morpheus were guilty, only that they could be sued under a theory of active inducement. An actual trial decision is still well off in the future. But this was more than enough for some. RIAA then went on the offensive. The Journal reported:

After June's Supreme Court ruling, the RIAA, on behalf of the labels, approached the co-defendants in the case, Grokster and Morpheus, about the possibility of a settlement.

RIAA kept up the full court press by kickstarting the legal process with cease and desist orders against other top developers.

The Journal's sources said the deal would be a revenue-sharing arrangement. Here are some back-of-the-envelope calculations with rough numbers for fun. Assume 1 million active Grokster users and a conversion rate of 2% to a paid service for 20,000 paying Mashboxx customers. Figure a sales bounty of $10. That gives a potential deal of around $200,000.

Marc Freedman
RazorPop, developer of TrustyFiles, the leading multiple network file sharing software with search and download of ALL top networks.
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