Patent ID: 7730176
Filing Date: 2010-06-01
Classification: G06F

Abstract:
1. A method for identifying a digital content distributor on a file sharing network, comprising: establishing one or more connections to a wide area network through one or more crawler nodes, the file sharing network accessible through the wide area network; utilizing a data exchange server to transmit one or more search keywords to the one or more crawler nodes, the one or more search keywords stored in a primary database, the primary database coupled to the data exchange server, the data exchange server coupled to the one or more crawler nodes; submitting a search request through one or more crawler nodes to a file sharing network, the search request comprising the one or more search keywords; receiving one or more identifiers from the file sharing network, the one or more identifiers indicating a suspected distributor of a piece of digital content, the piece of digital content comprising a result of the search request, the one or more identifiers comprising an IP address of the suspected distributor; requesting one or more descriptive data, the one or more descriptive data to generally characterize the piece of digital content; performing preliminary filtering on the one or more descriptive data to determine accuracy of search request results; if the search request results are accurate, automatically initiating a multi-source download of a portion of the piece of digital content from the file sharing network by scheduling the multi-source download to begin at a predetermined time following confirmation that the file sharing network advertises availability of the piece of digital content, whereby a completion of the multi-source download effectively confirms an availability of the portion of the piece of digital content on the file sharing network; and examining a result of the multi-source download for confirming that a downloaded content matches a content description disclosed by the suspected distributor.