New Scientist reports that a company claims that they can stop filetrading at the source by tracking down the original culprit. Using certain techniques the company claims that they can find out who originally uploaded the file which may cause many people to rethink the supposed anonymity they have on peer-to-peer networks:

BayTSP, based in California, US, monitors peer-to-peer (P2P) trading networks using a technique called software “spidering”. The new software, called FirstSource, allows it to determine which user first uploaded a particular file for trading. It does this by mimicking the behaviour of a user on a massive scale - sending out multiple requests for a file extremely quickly. It deduces the culprits by assuming that only they will have the full 100% of the file, having uploaded the original.