I think the answer to this really depends on the industry you're talking to. If you speak to the media industry, I think this will remain for quite some time (either in positive or negative sense). However, if you speak to industries that work with distributed applications or web applications, I don't think this synonym exists anymore. There are a lot of success-stories where applying P2P technologies has provided added value, such as Blizzard (World of Warcraft updates) and Microsoft (which recently bought skype). In addition, projects like BOINC (seti@home, folding@home, etc) have been quite successful. Finally, although I have no citation, I expect that people working at organizations like Facebook and Twitter also owe a lot to distributed and peer-to-peer technologies too.

It depends on definition of "piracy". it seems that industry's counting on trade secret policy will always be in conflict with natural need of free information sharing.

Digital product industry business model is not suitable with the new ways we have to transfer multimedia. The industry (the few companies that distribute big part of popular digital products in this world) has been focusing this years in destroying this communication channels actually because of this, their business model is just not suitable, and companies are highly affected. That's why peer-to-peer means piracy, this companies have big influence on the government and they showed us how far can this arrive (i.e. Kim Schmitz and Megauplaod case). I think the only way all this concept can change, is to change the way that the industry distribute digital products, there are few start-ups that are doing a great job about this, for example Spotify, Amazon, OnLive and Beatport. It's a slow process, but everything will change.

I found appropriated to share with you the following article about Megaupload case, is very interesting and make awareness about this matter.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/10/ff-kim-dotcom/

I agree with Nacho about the industry business model. I also hope they will change, and we must not forget that there are a lot of other types of applications than file sharing we can do with P2P technology.

I think the answer to this really depends on the industry you're talking to. If you speak to the media industry, I think this will remain for quite some time (either in positive or negative sense). However, if you speak to industries that work with distributed applications or web applications, I don't think this synonym exists anymore. There are a lot of success-stories where applying P2P technologies has provided added value, such as Blizzard (World of Warcraft updates) and Microsoft (which recently bought skype). In addition, projects like BOINC (seti@home, folding@home, etc) have been quite successful. Finally, although I have no citation, I expect that people working at organizations like Facebook and Twitter also owe a lot to distributed and peer-to-peer technologies too.

"Focusing solely on access vulnerabilities, as most information security professionals are acutely aware, P2P is normally restricted to share-level security (also known as Password-Protected Share). Archetypical share-level assigned password security provisions two mutually exclusive access attributes (read-only and full) to a file, printer or other network object. Share-level security also normally lacks centralized access control capabilities. Specifically, a user 'access matrix' is usually absent from P2P architectures for granular authentication or authorization arbitration. Therefore, increased security risks are inherent with P2P deployment compared to other adoptable network configurations." - http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/security-governance/security-management-peertopeer-networking-21174

I support Mr. Damian Duda idea. Most P2P applications are dominanted by file sharing. But there are several applications that didn't touch by indisrtry. They were successfuly used for Distributed Computing in solving a computational problem without any charge. They also can be used for sensor application. Therefore, I don't think it is a synonym of piracy. and the indusry is an enemy for file or content sharing.

To maybe clarify my thoughts, I do not think that P2P is a synonym of piracy, but I think it is usually perceived as piracy by the industry, despite the great number of applications that are not related with illegal file sharing.

Only for material that is copyrighted and the owner of the material do not want to make it freely available. For materials that are not copyrighted or the owner has made it available freely, there is no piracy. For example, video lectures, tutorials, news items can be shared over the p2p network. It does not constitute an act of piracy because the owners have made it freely available.

P2P means that two machines (Computers) are connected through network on the first level of connection ( physical) ( MAC addresses not only IP address) , on that base they can exchange files and resources much faster because of the network Protocols that supers P2P has more data packet transfer than it's in TCP/IP

On the other hand P2P has very much less secure protocols as the two machines are connected physically , that's why Piracy is one of the thing that we need to worry about when connecting P2P

The acceptance of block chaining technology may dramatically change the peer-to-peer networking landscape.

I think the main problem is the lack of knowledge, in general, about what P2P is. Most people reduce P2P applications to file sharing and especially the sharing of copyrighted materials. This obviously gives a disastrous image of P2P. As Robert Davis said, block chaining may change this image in a relatively short time, also resolving the perception of insecurity of P2P networks and applications.