> From this perspective, it can be said that Web 2.0 is capitalism's
> preemptive attack against P2P systems.
Huh? Given that something like half the traffic on the Internet these days is P2P traffic, how can Web 2.0 be in any sense "preemptive"? The eMule network (which the authors mention in passing) and Bittorrent (which they -- astonishingly -- completely ignore) are subversive and highly effective projects to keep certain quarters of the commons public. Big Media had a window of opportunity a few years ago to preempt unofficial file-sharing, but they dropped the ball.
As for "content ownership" the writers refer to MySpace and Flickr. I have no experience with the former, but with regard to the latter, it is stated pretty clearly in their TOS <http://info.yahoo.com/legal/us/yahoo/utos/utos-173.html> that the copyrights to photos uploaded to that site remain with the people who upload them. I am not privy to the Flickr business model, but I can't see how Yahoo is making millions from other peoples' content.
They also state that "Usenet is mostly forgotten". Wow. I guess they haven't looked at Google Groups lately (Google's spiffy web Usenet interface). This would also come as big news to the many (paying) subscribers to the binaries newsgroups, which has evolved into a huge alternative filesharing network.
As an antidote to their doom and gloom, I would point to this site: <http://oscartorrents.com/>
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Colin Brace
Amsterdam