This is interesting...in an attempt to make a little dough and gain legitimacy without having to give in and fold like Napster, Kazaa has begun joint promotion with a few labels to distribute (with permission) new tracks from artists with new releases out or coming. Here's an excerpt from a press release I received this morning: COOKING VINYL PRE-RELEASES NEW IAN MCCULLOCH ALBUM TRACKS EXCLUSIVELY TO THE KAZAA MEDIA DESKTOP VIA ALTNET “Love In Veins’, ‘Sliding’ Available 24 April For Secure Download To Kazaa Media Desktop Users Via Altnet London, April 23, 2003: Musicindie today announced a groundbreaking new P2P pilot with the exclusive pre-release of two new tracks from UK independent Cooking Vinyl artist Ian McCulloch on Kazaa Media Desktop. Cooking Vinyl is the UK's first independent label to participate in the pilot, which utilises Altnet’s TopSearch technology to feature both tracks securely on the Kazaa Media Desktop from Thursday 24 April, some 2 weeks prior to the forthcoming US-release of ‘Slideling’, due out in stores on 6 May (Cooking Vinyl/spinArt). The tracks, in 192kbps (high quality) windows media format, are initially being made available for 24-hour unlimited play, followed by an option to purchase at 45 cents per track. Download the Kazaa Media Desktop on: http://www.kazaa.com start the application and open the search tool, then type "ian mcculloch" in the search box you should see 'Sliding' and 'Love In Veins' appear near the top of the results window with gold icons... then... be sure to keep these in your shared folder, so others can find them, and download them from you...
speaking as a software developer, they absolutely could. and not with much extra effort. everytime you download something, kazaa could send the filename, your ip address, etc. to a database.