Pablo Soto is the P2P wild man of Spain:

Pablo Soto has been hailed as the Spanish Shawn Fanning: a 23-year-old kid with a knack for coding, a passion for music and a certain brashness in his willingness to take on the record industry.

At least for now, Soto is better known in Europe, where two file-swapping services, Blubster and Piolet, are powered by the MP2P software he created. But he may gain a higher profile in the United States if established services, such as Grokster and iMesh, adopt his unique version of peer-to-peer software.

``I cannot say much,'' Soto said in an interview from his parents' home in Spain. ``But I will say that if you go to the rankings of the most downloaded peer-to-peer programs — if you take from the second to the seventh, all of them are talking with me.''

....Soto began crafting his own file-swapping architecture, using a different file transfer protocol called UDP to move files, instead of the traditional Internet TCP protocol. It is a ``connectionless'' protocol that doesn't reveal the individual addresses of each computer connected to the network, affording users a certain degree of anonymity.

He calls his software MP2P. And he created Blubster, a file-swapping service created, and since sold, as a proof of concept. It has been downloaded 3.5 million times on CNet's download.com Web site — and attracted the notice of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, the European affiliate of the Recording Industry Association of America. [Mercury News]