There are a few studies floating around today regarding P2P and file-sharing. Sandvine threw their numbers out with the stunning yet not so surprising claim that about 44% of Internet traffic is consumed with P2P traffic. This has remained fairly consistent over the years, as several bandwidth management companies have even floated numbers at high at 75%.

But what's in a number really. Well, if you're on the losing side of a P2P transfer, that number equates to lost money. And with hand held devices such as the mobile phone beginning to encroach on the computing landscape, the entertainment industry may survive the current salvo only to face a new nightmare - the war against the handheld machines.

In recent years, laptop computing has become flat out cheap. For less than $300, the consumer can bridge the digital divide and join the Internet fracas. And who wants to miss out on that? Since the mid part of this decade, laptop sales have encroached upon, and then exceeded desktop sales. With the economic downturn crunching wallets, the less expensive laptop option has become much more viable.

The logic makes sense. Not only are laptops cheap, they've become stylish and can outperform many larger desktops. And their major selling point? Portability. While the battery still seems to take up a bulk of their weight, this is slowly improving. If nothing else, the power to weight ratio has improved dramatically over the past several years. That technological progress has translated to small, portable devices as well.

The cell phone, for example, is no longer the plastic brick it was 15 years ago. What was once merely a phone is now a small, near-fully functional computer. The iPhone has come close to blurring the lines completely, yet we're still not quite there yet. But incrementally, the computer's functionality is coming to the mobile devices - WiFi, web browsing, email, document productivity, and of course, file-sharing. What good is a mobile phone if the consumer can’t listen to music, play games, and watch movies?

The operating systems on most mobile devices flat out stink, which impeded file-sharing development to some extent. However, with the advent of web based file-sharing clients, this is no longer the serious detriment it once was. Although obstacles still remain, sharing music and movies via the mobile phone is becoming increasingly mainstream. And if the latest research from Pioneer Consulting is even remotely correct, the uptake of file-sharing on mobile devices could cost the entertainment industry a staggering $16.4 billion by 2012.