The Motion Picture Association of America has sent letters to the nation's ISPs and universities, according to a c|net report, warning them that users are trading movies over Gnutella. Since Gnutella is a decentralized network, it's obviously much more difficult to legally stop the system, as is happening with Napster, so ISPs are being conscripted into stopping the video trade. It's not clear from c|net whether the MPAA is making any threats; the MPAA spokesman says they are "educating the population."

The EFF just sent out a fundraising letter, in which they say: "We believe it is only a matter of time before the RIAA sues individual developers of P2P technologies in an attempt to hold them responsible for copyright-infringing uses by users of those technologies. We also expect that ISPs will begin receiving litigation threats and may even be included in litigation themselves. We have begun meeting with P2P developers to discuss the possible legal challenges they may face." Their web site has some papers on the subject.

Decentralization or P2P? A press release from NextPage explains that the government site FedStats.net is constructed by piecing together data maintained locally by 70 different agencies. Compare that to the taskforce effort needed to coordinate moving, hosting, and updating all this data at a centralized location, and you have a big win for "decent" over "cent." But P2P no longer seems the right term for this sort of thing; for that matter, decentralized computing never quite satisfied as P2P, either.

The WSJ reports that Microsoft and Real are working on schemes to limit the quality of MP3s to 56K, while offering high-quality, copy-controllable, proprietary alternatives. The recording industry is, um, supportive.

Over the last week or so, AOL started blocking Jabber, gaim, and Fire clients from connecting to AIM servers. At first AOL was doing IP blocking of Jabber servers, but at a certain point the strategy switched, and AOL started targeting libfaim, a library used by all these clients to communicate with AIM. The result was a classic cat-and-mouse game where AOL changes their protocol to block libfaim and open source programmers alter the library.

On Wednesday, April 25, 2001, Bill Joy and John Gage, of Sun Microsystems, will unveil the project's site and provide an in-depth look at JXTA.

It's High Noon at the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday, April 3, as Napster's Hank Barry, RIAA's Hilary Rosen, and of course, Ted Nugent testify at a hearing on online entertainment. Napster fans marching to the hearing from D.C.'s Union Station.

In the NY Times Mag, Rob Walker suggests the recording industry could cozy up to downloadable music the way book publishers did to paperbacks, or the movie moguls did to videos. Downloaded music could be paperback music -- published six months after the album debuts on CD, without all that great packaging, and with MP3, not CD quality (they ain't the same!). Would you pay $9 for a downloadable album instead of $18 for the real McCoy?

As if to prove Lawrence Lessig's contention that the copyright industry operates on two fronts -- code plus law -- comes this story from the LA Times that the RIAA is looking for Internet security firms to help them hack gnutella. There's no shortage of companies willing to take Hollywood's money, but can it be done?

Consilient today released the Consilient Sitelet Technology Platform. Sitelets are "portable interactive process containers" which allow complex business processes to be broken down into components. Look for Andy Oram's upcoming profile of Consilient on openP2P.com.