MPAA/BitTorrent post-mortem: a torrent or a trickle?

Snip from a piece I filed today for Wired News:

Hollywood's copyright police and the maker of the most potent movie piracy software of all time took the stage here Tuesday and solemnly declared détente.

It's all but certain the deal between the Motion Picture Association of America and BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen won't dent the file-swapping epidemic, let alone stop it.

No. As pronouncements droned on of an epoch-making moment in the history of digital media, the most important outcome could well turn out to be something much less significant, though equally priceless: The picture of MPAA chief Dan Glickman in a BitTorrent T-shirt.

"We don't anticipate any major effects from this announcement," declared Mark Ishikawa of file-sharing traffic-analysis firm BayTSP, one of the deal's numerous skeptics. "Pirates are transport-agnostic. They move wherever they can get and transmit content with the least interference.

"Unless you eradicate the current BitTorrent protocol and make it stop working, you can't stop people from using it for both legal and illegal purposes," he added.

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