Information distribution by fleamarket system

Information distribution with copyright control has become a major topic in electronic commerce. With systems based on the secure WWW there are some problems in application to the "pay per view (PPV)" service and in the system structure which concentrates system functions. To overcome these problems, we propose a new information distribution model which allows commercial information registered by an information provider to be freely distributed on the Internet with copyright control. The content is protected against fabrication and access without authorization by utilizing encryption techniques. A user can access it by getting a enciphering key from a key server after an authorization procedure, for example after making payment. This model is applicable to the PPV service and reduces the load of specific hosts and networks compared with systems based on the secure WWW.