If you've been following the entertainment industry's recent strategy of suing filesharers into submission, check out Jeff Howe's excellent "Wired" piece about the underground networks that are responsible for most of the pirated content on the Net. As Howe points out, a relatively small number of people have to engage in a lot of criminal activity before a movie or CD is even available on networks such as Kazaa and WinMX:

It's all a big game.... Whoever transfers the most files to the most sites in the least amount of time wins. There are elaborate rules, with prizes in the offing and reputations at stake.... Once a file is posted to a [top underground network], it starts a rapid descent through wider and wider levels of an invisible network, multiplying exponentially along the way. At each step, more and more pirates pitch in to keep the avalanche tumbling downward. Finally, thousands, perhaps millions, of copies - all the progeny of that original file - spill into the public peer-to-peer networks: Kazaa, LimeWire, Morpheus. Without this duplication and distribution structure providing content, the P2P networks would run dry.

This, of course, runs contrary to the industry's reasoning for suing public P2P users, which is that regular consumers are buying music and movies and then sharing them with the world:

In reality, the number of files on the Net ripped from store-bought CDs, DVDs, and videogames is statistically negligible. People don't share what they buy; they share what is already being shared - the countless descendants of a single "Adam and Eve" file. Even this is probably stolen; pirates have infiltrated the entertainment industry and usually obtain and rip content long before the public ever has a chance to buy it.

Through interviews with several people active in the underground networks, Howe provides a detailed account of how pirates obtain their source material, prepare it for distribution, and unleash it upon the world. [Wired.com] The Shadow Internet

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Howe's story comes just one day after Clive Thompson's equally intriguing report on BitTorrent, the most recent thorn in Hollywood's side. [Wired.com] The BitTorrent Effect