Futuríveis

Yet a year later, peer-to-peer, or P2P, sharing continues to thrive, with firms behind favorite applications such as eDonkey, LimeWire, Morpheus and Kazaa, among others, still in business.

Although the threat of litigation did force the operators of BearShare, WinMX and i2Hub to shut down, the number of people using file-sharing services has gone up.

The average number of simultaneous file-sharing users was about 9.7 million worldwide in May, with about 6.7 million from the United States, according to BigChampagne LLC, which tracks file-sharing activity. In the same period last year, BigChampagne tracked 8.6 million average users globally and 6.2 million in the United States.

Grokster ruling with helping to clarify the legal roadmap for copyright in the Internet Age and motivating some of the file-sharing operators to close down or go legit.

Without it, or the music companies' roughly 18,000 lawsuits filed against individual file-sharers since 2003, online piracy would be even worse, said Mitch Bainwol, chairman of the Washington-based group.

"We don't suggest that (unauthorized file-sharing) has been conquered, far from it," Bainwol said. "But it's not fundamentally decapitating the legal marketplace from growing in a pretty robust fashion."

Sales from music downloads, online subscription services and mobile phone ringtones have helped boost revenues and offset declines in CD sales for some labels.

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