I've occasionally run Kazaa_lite at college where it displayed something between 5 - 12 users online. It was days where there the college had problems with its internet connection. Any searches I had done returned very few results or 'No matches found' instantly, meaning that what ever nodes it was connected to and searched had to be local. Later on, the number of users online suddenly shot back up to several million.

After seeing the above likely means that Kazaa is a decentralised network. I'd be interested on how it finds out the IP addresses of its peers. ;-)

FastTrack's technology has been documented pretty well over the years and if I recall correctly, the client itself includes huge list of "supernodes" IP addresses that it first tries to connect to in order to retrieve the list of other supernodes from the supernode it managed to connect to and then gets the connection across the P2P network up and running. Supernodes are simply users who have enough bandwidth and fast enough computer to act simultaneously as a client and a server and those supernodes are being assigned "on the fly" by the software itself unless you check the box "don't act as supernode" off from your Kazaa/Grokster settings.

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Tricky case. These companies don´t stand by and watch when people swap illegal files, they don´t control the service liek Napster did. But they sort of help people brake the law by providing them with the means to do so, the application itself.

The united states cannot sue Sharman networks, aren´t involved with the US.

This will be a even harder decission then with the Napster-case.