File-sharing draws fuel from fed Court ruling. (Broadband Week[TM]).

A recent U.S. District Court ruling in favor of file-swapping services could accelerate an already growing wave of peer-to-peer traffic that threatens to bog down even broadband cable's wide pipes.

But the problem also is creating a ready market for a crop of service-control-systems out-fits offering systems that can track peer-to-peer usage and offer tools to regulate how much bandwidth it can claim.

Last month, a U.S. district court judge gave Internet file-sharing services Grokster, Kazaa and Morpheus a legal shield, ruling that they could not control illegal file swaps between their users and therefore could not be held responsible and shut down.

Unlike peer-to-peer predecessor Napster -- shut down in 2001 for copyright violations -- the newer services don't manage a central index of shared …