The use of the word leaf is intended almost literally. There are many leaves in a forest and fewer trees. When you are new to Gnutella, you will always be designated a leaf and you have to access the wealth of copyright free material through the ultrapeer network. In this more lowly position, you will not be prejudiced, The search system is designed to return the same number of hits regardless whether the searcher is leaf or ultrapeer.

However, should you have lots of free bandwidth, and you provide good qualntities of copyright free material on a reliable basis with a high upload success rate, then in time you may be designated an utrapeer and a proportion of your bandwidth will carry the traffic between the other ultrapeers, and leaves will connect to you for access to Gnutella.

So I may not be Shakespearean, forsooth, but I have tarried enough on this commission and must exit stage left in search of someone bare.