P2P company eDonkey's attempts to survive in a post-Grokster world will be the stuff of books, documentaries and conference panels for years to come. BusinessWeekOnline captures the dilemma faced by Sam Yagan and Jed McCaleb, the P2P company's co-founders. (via Prefixblog). Writer Burt Helm put it this way: "Now (Yagan) is trying to reinvent eDonkey and use its popularity as a foundation for a legitimate business." That means trying to work with the content owners who are sending him cease-and-desist letters.

The article shows a few things. First, Grokster has initiated a sort of scared straight program for P2P companies. To some that points to a "chilling effect" (a negative effect on innovation caused by legal uncertainties) but let's not forget about the innovation from those companies scared straight. The RIAA's Cary Sherman and Snocap's Shawn Fanning predict all sorts of growth and innovation to spring up to support and create new legal P2P companies. Some innovation may be chilled, but there's other innovation that will arise. Over the long term the thing to look at will be the net of the two.

Also, P2P may not be avoidable, but when I read that the president of StreamCast Networks (owner of Morpheus) said, "The [file-sharing] landscape in America is going to be dramatically different just 30 days from now," it's hard to believe that the Surpreme Court ruling will have no impact. It may not impact the innovation of rogue file sharing applications, but it is and will impact the formation of legitimate file sharing. When and if legal P2P will gain traction is another issue.

JupiterResearch's David Carr is skeptical eDonkey can do something about the software that's already out there. "They are going to have to prove that their value is something other than free music," he said.

Related: BitTorrent may have the exact opposite fortunes as eDonkey. Here's an article by Fortune on BitTorrent's creator, Bram Cohen.