Patent ID: 7720933

Claim:
A method for transferring content between clients, the method comprising: receiving at a server a first manually entered setting from a first operator entity indicating a first set of potentially eligible sources, wherein the first manually entered setting is chosen from a first group consisting of settings to indicate one or more of: end user delivery is permitted, conventional delivery is permitted, preferred delivery type, number of simultaneous uploads, number of simultaneous downloads, delivery speed before switching to conventional delivery, upload bandwidth, download bandwidth, central dispatch of search results, user dispatch of search results, number of simultaneous applications using end user delivery, and/or scope of user originated download; receiving at the server a second manually entered setting from a second operator entity indicating a second set of potentially eligible sources, wherein: the second operator entity comprises an Internet Service Provider (ISP), a content delivery network or a content originator and wherein the second operator entity is different from the first operator entity; the second manually entered setting is chosen from a second group consisting of settings to indicate one or more of: end user delivery is permitted, conventional delivery is permitted, preferred delivery type, number of simultaneous uploads, number of simultaneous downloads, delivery speed before switching to conventional delivery, upload bandwidth, download bandwidth, central dispatch of search results, user dispatch of search results, number of simultaneous applications using end user delivery, and/or scope of user originated download; and the second manually entered setting overrides one of the first group; receiving at the server a notification of a request for content from a first client; determining with the server a policy based on the first manually entered setting and second manually entered setting indicating a set of eligible sources, wherein the set of eligible sources is drawn from the first set and the second set of potentially eligible sources; determining with the server a subset of the set of eligible sources that have the content, the subset including one or more second clients; and sending an indication of the subset from the server to the first client.