] Back in July, a number of filesharing companies formed a trade
] association to push for, among other things, compulsory
] licensing [...]. I wonder how much they have really thought this
] through. After all, a compulsory license that legimitized
] filesharing would quickly put most of these companies out of
] business.

this guy makes some interesting points, but i think his final conclusion is wrong. There are still a lot of IM services out there, with varying numbers of users. What happened is not that all but one died out, but that developers built clients that talk to all the networks, and users registered accounts with 2 or 3 or more different IM systems. I could see a similar thing happening with file sharing systems... they'll become neighborhoods, more or less suited to particular types and classes of information, and clients will be built that transparently handle all of them at once.

LawMeme - Compulsory Licensing - The Death of Gnutella and the Triumph of Google