Patent 7987368 was granted and assigned to Microsoft on July, 2011 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
In a peer-to-peer environment, copyrights and users' privacies can be protected by a tracking mechanism. In described implementations, tracking mechanisms can use certificates that are produced using random numbers to protect the privacy of users and/or certificates that are produced responsive to at least one hardware identifier to enable uploader to be identified to protect copyrights.