Presumably having established that you are a p2p user, they then get the list of the files that you are "making available" for download, and then sue you.

And they have just won a court case. Google on Jammie Thomas.

So if I understand correctly:

1. You search P2P for a file
2. The potential results include a media company "spy" machine.
3. You connect to said spy machine and download one of the media companies tracks.

How can they take you to court for this? What have you done that is illegal? They OWN the track, therefore they have the legal right to distribute the track, (if they don't then THEY are breaking the law not you!!). They have advertised the track as available on the P2P network and then given you the track when you requested it without asking you for any money.

I do not understand how this can possibly be illegal.

Alternatively if you try to download a track and they feed you "junk" to try and corrupt your download and then try to take you to court, all they have is that you "requested" to download a song from them. That's like walking into a shop asking the shop to give you a free cd and them saying "no" and then trying to take you to court for attempting shoplifting! If the shop gave you the CD you have not done anything illegal, if they don't you've not done anything illegal. Same difference with this.

Maybe that's why dispite all the noise the RIAA has never actually won a court case.

What I wonder about is if I’ll be spied on by the Bush and barney's bigets for connecting to peers in Iran or elsewhere. It’s not illegal, but you know what they say, garbage in, garbage out.

Well its a good thing that Azureus has its own built in filter to determine bad data and couple that with peerguardian and your not bad off