Patent ID: 8010666

Claim:
A computer program product for identifying a digital content distributor on a file sharing network, the computer program product being encoded on one or more non-transitory machine-readable storage media and comprising: instruction for initiating a content search by submitting a search request to the file sharing network, the search request comprising one or more keywords; instruction for receiving a result of the content search, the result including a suspect file that comprises a plurality of file segments; instruction for downloading each of the file segments by: initiating a download of a selected file segment of the suspect file via a specific external identifier on the file sharing network; storing the selected file segment received from the file sharing network; and recording segment attribute information for the selected file segment, the segment attribute information including source information and a file sharing protocol for the selected file segment; instruction for utilizing the source information to determine a distributor for each of the file segments; instruction for determining whether the distributor is utilizing a second file sharing protocol; instruction for logging the determination whether the distributor is utilizing the second file sharing protocol; and instruction for combining the stored file segments to form a digital copy of the suspect file.