Thank you for clarifying your points, since there were a few that I didn't quite understand. However, there are still a few things you seem to be missing from my post.

This is partly true. However, this doesn't stop them from suing your ISP. An ISP is responsible for keeping a log of all connections. If an organization had evidence that a hacker originated from a particular ISP, that ISP would be required to release the log of their connection or risk being sued. This particular case happened to the ISP I worked for for several years. I'm sure that no Ultrapeer would be willing to stick their necks out for any of its users, let alone have to deal with lawyers and the responsibity to search through activity logs. Their protection is that your information is freely available through the network.

Yes, this is true. Especially with the fact that they couldn't trace who exactly was uploading what to make themselves a case. However, I can see a huge lawsuit down the line that could force Gnutella to publish their logs globally (or to certain organizations). If you notice with all illegal activity (whether it should be illegal or not) they will always find some way to locate a culprit and prosecute them. This is especially true when "Big Money" is involved (e.g. the ever-growing music industry). Thank you Capitalism!

First of all, if you have merely 2 truly working sources, the task will be split up between the 2 sources. So you are already guaranteed that you won't send 100% of the file if a reliable source has the same file. Explicitly checking for this isn't necessary, and could provide false positives that harm the network (what if 6 of the 7 sources disconnect your download?). As a side-note the 6 hz joke was not intended as a crack at anyone's intelligence, so I apologize if I offended you.

I did read your post about your lawsuit, which absolutely sucks. I wish you luck with that, and for all the others going through the same thing. What I was trying to say here is exactly like your "problem parasite".

Numbers are important for a network like Gnutella simply because of how it was designed. If you use the proxy method, the network will be limited to the power of the Ultrapeers, and not the power of all its members. This means you could still have 5000000 sources of a single file and not have it be any faster than 2 sources due to network traffic. Although, it would increase the chances of more reliable sources. Arguably you could say that the more members you get, the more Ultrapeers you would get, so this might be a moot point. But my argument stands that the concept behind Gnutella would be compromised to accomplish this.

I never said you should be forced to comply with laws, since that is obviously up to the user. You use Gnutella AT YOUR OWN RISK.

You are absolutely right, you don't have to trust the individuals, only the network itself. But on a public network like Gnutella, you're giving data freely to the world, and receiving data freely from anyone in the world. Especially when you start allowing anonymous transfers, it means you won't even know who you're dealing with. Supposing a client abused the Gnutella network to spread a virus. How would we track down and eliminate this virus if we don't know where it came from? People could abuse the anonymity factor for this in the same way you want to use it for sharing illegal material.

Before I even touch on this subject I would like to state that I completely agree that music companies are huge corporations that do overcharge their customers and that the artist who intellectually made the product is extremely underpaid. But there is more than just creativity and talent needed to produce music for profit. If artists could do it themselves, they would. And quite a few do. However, they don't tend to make much profit over it.

To produce a CD is slowly becoming obsolete, since it is far cheaper to distribute the music files individually or in a package over the internet. So I must say, why would anyone buy a download to a file that is basically identical to the one they downloaded for free on gnutella? If you merely wanted to support the artist, you could easily send them a donation via PayPal off their website. It would be nice to have that link in the music file that could be gathered from CDDB or FreeDB. But honestly, how many files do you find on Gnutella that actually use this information? I'd say about 20% of all people who use Gnutella even know that such databases exist, and only about 10% of those people actually use them! Maybe someday music industries could compromise by allowing downloads as long as a link is attached, but this could result in some nasty adware music files like most promotional wmv movies.