First Monday has published a scholarly article analyzing several popular "P2P" systems used for music and video distribution from a perspective of self-organizing networks. Bryn Loban's recent article, "Between rhizomes and trees: P2P information systems" includes discussion of the robust nature of distributed networks that lack a centralized topology, and the vulnerability of such a network to targeted attacks on hubs or "supernodes" exhibiting high connectivity.
He includes legal attacks in this vulnerability analysis, saying:
"Another feature of decentralised P2P FS networks is that they are more resistant to legal attacks. It is difficult for these networks to be closed due to legal action, as is evident from the fact that, at the time of writing, both Gnutella and Kazaa are still in operation, unlike Napster. * * * This may be true but, yet again, if legal attacks were to be targeted at certain Kazaa super–nodes, for instance those which upload the greatest quantity of files, the network would be severely damaged."
First Monday is a free, online publisher of scholarly, peer-reviewed articles. "Between rhizomes and trees: P2P information systems" by Bryn Loban is found in First Monday, volume 9, number 10 (October 2004), URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_10/loban/index.html