Seems like RIAA is going to win another battle, closing the p2p eDonkey network. In a testimony at a U.S. Senate Judiciary Hearing on the future of P2P, MetaMachine president Sam Yagan said his company (owner of the eDonkey network) was throwing in the towel.

The battle is lost, but the war continues: eDonkey is a server based p2p network, so all you need to shut it off is going for the servers. eDonkey is the most used p2p network, as stated by Slyck, so this decision seems to be a huge drawback in the war.

But if we look at the remaining networks, like FastTrack, Gnutella or BitTorrent, they all share the "no servers, use supernodes instead" implementation, there is, the supernode functionality is built into the client; if a powerful computer with a fast network connection runs the client software, it will automatically become a supernode, effectively acting as a temporary indexing server for other, slower clients.

And since supernodes come and go, all over the IP space, like digital mushroms, they are much harder to identify and shut down. So, light infantry is down, but we still have tanks and planes for the next battle.