Patent ID: 7730176

Claim:
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, sending one or more identifiers to the data exchange server; and storing the one or more identifiers for a validation of the IP address of the suspected distributor in the primary database, whereby the validation effectively confirms that the suspected distributor makes the piece of digital content available on the file sharing network via the validated IP address without downloading the piece of digital content; 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.