The music industry "basically took what they could get" from Gorton and LimeWire, said Eric Johnson, professor of operations management at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business.

"The $105 million has more to do with Gorton's potential ability to pay" than with any real damages that might have been sustained by the music industry, said Johnson, who has testified before Congress several times on P2P-related security issues.

RIAA has now successfully managed to force settlements from the major file-sharing services, he said.

"But I don't think it has slowed piracy down an iota," Johnson said. With the closure of LimeWire and other major P2P networks, users have just moved to different sources for illegal music downloads, he said.

Those sources include Frostwire, an open source tool that uses the same Gnutella technology that LimeWire is based on. Other examples include BitTorrent, eDonkey and BearShare he said.