it dosent matter where and how many people you get a file from. I have personally hacked into people's computers through the kazaa network (kazaa, imesh, groakster, and morpheous when they used to use that network). you see, even if you send only 1 packet to my computer i can read the source ip address off of that and backtrace up your system with a vuneralbility that used to be in cydoor. they've fixed that now, but i could still ipspoof my way into your system through your firewall and see what you have. thats illegal pretty much everwhere, but corporate interests hire independent companies to put their media [movies, music, software] illegally on that network and they trace your ip, look up who it is registered to and threaten to sue the isp who in turn drops your account and ban's you from ever holding an account with them again. the problem lies in the way that the internet works. you have to have packet overhead for error control, which means you can trace everything. unless youre using a protocol that dosent include a source ip, in which case most of what you download wouldnt work because it will almost always contain some errors.
the solution:
* move to a platform where ALL software is free and legal
* IRC
* become involved with an underground software liberation gorup
* do it and don't give a |=uc|<
* or learn how it works and hack it all yourself
personally i like option(s) 1 & 5
the guys who made fasttrack did it on the side and then it got big cause their tcp stack allowed for multiple sources which meant threaded downloads==faster downloads. then like everyone else big business in america decided that they deserved money from that and pulled the carpet out from under them so they sold it to sherman.
you always HAVE the option to create your own p2p system though. its not really that hard to do. just make sure that it really is a truely distributed application. as soon as you start to try to make money from it is when you'll get fuxxed
the reason why the kazaa network got to be so big was because indepentent hacker organizations started sharing things they had hacked (in terms of software) with people who weren't in thier immediate group. and kiddo's with mp3 software started encoding their favorite music in the post napster era. many people who had used napster were looking for a new way to share files and found this "Kazaa" program which offered so much more!
if you start a p2p make sure that you have a butt load of stuff on your computer that people want.