March 2001 was a bad month for peer-to-peer networking. It started with the appearance of Mandragore, a virus that spreads via the Gnutella P2P file sharing service. Then, on March 5, a federal judge ruled against the most visible of the emerging P2P systems, Napster, ordering the company to block the distribution of copyrighted songs. Do the twin risks of legal suppression from the outside and viral corruption from within threaten to nip P2P in the bud?
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