You’ve probably already seen the headlines swamping your inbox, news sites and RSS feeds: ”Hollywood wants BitTorrent Dead” or some other similar sensationalistic tease. On closer examination it appears that Dan Glickman (the new head of the MPAA) has wised up in regards to P2P and copyright issues over his predecessor Jack Valenti.

MPAA anti-piracy chief John Malcolm said the trade organization’s actions were not aimed at criminalizing P2P technology itself, citing “legal torrent” services that specialize in public-domain material as examples of the technology’s non-infringing potential.

Part of this change in tone has to do with the relentless campaigns by Bram Cohen and sites like Legal Torrents that demonstrate BitTorrent’s utility in downloading large files regardless of their copyright status. But the MPAA’s approach also reveals that they’ve learned some technological lessons as well. Instead of suing individual file sharers they are instead suing “tracker servers” which do not (usually) in themselves hold any copyrighted files.

I’m afraid that this approach reveals the one achilles heel of BitTorrent. Suing the tracker servers (or merely intimidating ISPs into shutting them down) will eventually crush BitTorrent trading. It’s also important to note that eDonkey and DirectConnect servers were also targeted.

So what happens now? Will people abandon these protocols and move onto new uncharted P2P lands? Is it possible to code a P2P protocol that doesn’t require indexing of some kind? It is going to take a while before any new technology can replace BT, eD or DC but most of the noise will come from those who felt that they were immune from the MPAA’s attacks. BitTorrent will live on as a useful protocol for distributing Linux ISOs and other legal content but DirectConnect will almost certainly die out considering its focus on almost exclusively trading copyrighted content.