The entertainment industry's open-ended war against online piracy -- both real and imagined -- has spawned its share of unintended consequences. But perhaps the most interesting of the bunch, and arguably the most troubling for groups such as the RIAA and MPAA, involves the race to create a new breed of tougher, more secure peer-to-peer networks.

If you believe the industry's press releases, its recent string of legal victories against the likes of BearShare and Kazaa represented major victories against P2P-based music and movie piracy. The reality, of course, is very different: These networks have been obsolete for years now, having given way to a third wave of even more decentralized P2P technologies -- including, of course, BitTorrent.