How File Sharing Reveals Your Identity
Here’s an extract of an Article I’ve came across which tells you about how file sharing can reveal your identity to the RIAA and then how they can sue you!
Following the death of Napster, all of the file sharing networks that rose to main-stream popularity were decentralized. The most popular networks include Gnutella (which powers Limewire, BearShare, and Morpheus) and FastTrack (which powers KaZaA and Grokster). The decentralization provides legal protection for the companies that distribute the software, since they do not have to run any component of the network themselves: once you get the software, you become part of the network, and the network could survive even if the parent company disappears.
All of these networks operate as a web or mesh of neighboring node connections. Your node connects to a few other nodes in the network, and those nodes connect to a few other nodes, which in turn connect to a few other nodes, and so on. This layout is similar to a real-life social network: you know people, and those people know other people, who in turn know other people, and so on.