A fair micro-payment scheme for profit sharing in P2P networks

Despite their large success, file sharing and peer to peer systems are used mainly for illegal actions, such as violations of author's copyright. Many commercial proposals have been made available, but at the present time, there is a lack o/inherently legal file sharing tools which remain attractive for all the involved parties. In this paper we propose a protocol which connects authors and customers in a micro-payment scheme, where the selling rights are transferred from peer to peer. When a good is sold, authors are correctly paid, even if they were not directly involved in the transactions. Moreover, the holder of the sold item is partially refunded, thus discouraging free riders. This proposal is based on the previous work on PPay, and can be seen as an attempt for introducing successful commerce in practical file sharing applications.