Can File Swapping Really be Stopped?

People who fight file swapping would like to believe it can be stopped. But the opposite is the fact. The first part is the fact that there are distributed Peer-to-Peer networks, that are not controlled from a central place and in which search, uploads and downloads are not centralised.

So they can say “that’s fine. We’ll log in with a fake client and find people who upload files are prosecute them according to their IPs”. Enter Tor, the anonymous Internet communication system. Within the Tor network, traffic to the actual Internet is trafficked to different nodes in the network, and everything is encrypted, so one cannot determine the real origin of the request. If someone uploads a file from a Tor node - the file may actually reside on the host of a completely different Tor user.

The measures that copyright conglomerates have taken to try and stop file-sharing were appalling. From pulling out file sharing sites and services under legal threats, to demanding ISPs to give the identities of their file-sharing users (against any reasonable measurement of privacy), to prosecuting and harassing file sharers. All of this for fighting against a non-existent loss of profits. Will you sell your soul to the Devil in order to make a profit of 1.2 billion dollars instead of 1 billion?