A Traceable and Fair Transaction Mechanism for Digital Rights Management on P2P Networks

Abstract

In recent years, more and more people use Internet and with the improvements of communication technology, information sharing trends has surged over Internet. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks have become the main stream of file-sharing platform. However, many digital contents, which do not get permission to be copied or delivered, are privately spread by uploading to servers or P2P networks. The piracy issue seriously hurts license owners' deserved profits and potential market. For this reason, digital rights management (DRM) is considered as a general preventive measure to avoid copyright infringement. However, a conventional DRM system is only suitable for client-server architecture, and its implementation on P2P network would be quite difficult. This research plans to develop a novel traceable and fair transaction mechanism which not against the sharing purpose of P2P networks and protecting digital rights of digital contents.