Last December, Vincent Falco, a 28-year-old game programmer in West Palm Beach, FL, released version 1.0 of a pet project he called BearShare. BearShare is decentralized file-sharing software-that is, it allows thousands of Internet users to search each other's hard drives for files and exchange them without any supervision or monitoring. Released free of charge, downloaded millions of times, BearShare is a raspberry in the face of the music, film and publishing industries: six months after the release of version 1.0, tens of thousands of songs, movies, videos and texts were coursing through the network every day. Because the software links together a constantly changing, ad hoc collection of users, Falco says, "there's no central point for the industries to attack." BearShare, in other words, is unstoppable.

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