Patent ID: 8301724

Claim:
A method for distributing media files over a peer-to-peer network, the method comprising: configuring an information handling system to act as a node in the peer-to-peer network, said peer-to-peer network being organized loosely without any centralized management authority, said information handling system being further configured to follow rules and protocols of the de-centralized peer-to-peer network, the information handling system comprising a result server and a file server; controlling, with the file server, a database of stored media files, wherein each of the stored media files encodes a material and contains embedded executable code, said embedded executable code causing at least one advertisement to be presented to request issuing peers of the peer-to-peer network each time a requested media file is utilized; probing, with the result server, network traffic to discover file search requests from the request issuing peers, said file search requests seeking one or more materials; searching, with the result server, a database for names of media files satisfying a discovered file search request; and conveying, with the result server, search results to a request issuing peer, said search results comprising names of a set of one or more media files satisfying the discovered file search request and a link associated with each file name in the set, wherein each link, when activated by the request issuing peer, causes transmission of a request to the file server for a media file associated with the link, wherein the file server responds to the request by sending the requested media file to the request issuing peer, comprising a copy of the sought material and the embedded executable code, and wherein each time the received media file from the file server is utilized, the embedded executable code is triggered and presents the request issuing peer with at least one advertisement before or during playback of the material of the media file.