Decentralized digital content exchange and copyright protection via P2P networks

This paper presents the use of a novel Peer to Peer (P2P) infrastructure in order to provide rapid broad digital content exchange, digital rights protection and efficient transaction management through watermarking technologies. Copyright owners use digital watermarking techniques so as to encrypt copyright information to the content. This information is represented by multiple watermarking keys used, amongst other reasons, for proof of ownership, unique identification and transaction management. Especially for transaction management the watermarking keys used are constantly changing following the content's route from user to user. The challenges for this research are a) the use of P2P technologies for efficient Digital Rights Management (DRM), b) to apply a robust watermarking algorithm to digital content which successfully embeds and detects multiple keys for each use case and c) to successfully maintain consistent the P2P system when watermarking keys are changing during content's transaction. This paper concludes that DRM and P2P can be quite complementary and not always contradictory.