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and the unlawful storage, usage, manipulation,
and sharing of billions of pieces of intellectual
property (IP) content. This has become worse
with the emergence of decentralized peer-to-peer
(P2P) networks. In that respect, content providers
must carefully choose how to deliver their digital
content to their consumers by simultaneously
enabling copyright protection on one hand and
the sales on the other hand throughout the life
cycle of their product.
The aim of this chapter is to show that there
are three main hurdles content providers must
overcome to conduct business with digital
music. The first is establishing an efficient and
economically viable distribution channel. So
far, most legal music downloads are based on
centralized systems such as client-server based
models. However, most users today use decen-
tralized systems to access and download music
files such as peer-to-peer networks. Despite the
fact that sharing of copyrighted content on those
networks is illegal, they have found wide spread
usage. This chapter compares the two distribution
systems along various dimensions such as cost
of ownership, scalability, performance, security,
quality of services/control, and concludes that
decentralized systems have many advantages
over centralized ones, where the main weakness
is security and control.
The second hurdle to overcome is to develop a
secure and interoperable framework for protect-
ing copyrighted digital music from piracy. The
emergence of Digital Rights Management Systems
(DRM) enables content providers to control the
access and usage of their digital content. This
chapter outlines the key components of a DRM,
the core entities involved, discusses the pros and
cons of DRM, and concludes that DRM has the
potential to overcome some of the weaknesses
of decentralized distribution systems by offering
additional and augmenting functionalities for
security and control.
The third hurdle is to establish a robust pay-
ment mechanism that meets the content providers'
needs for revenue capturing and the consumers'
needs for hassle-free and legal content acquisi-
tion and use.
Finally, this chapter presents a DRM supported
peer-to-peer network which could address and
overcome the three hurdles mentioned previ-
ously. It presents a framework, which is different
to the existing ones by outlining and describing
in detail the key components needed such as the
log server, the index server, the licensing server
with key management, and rights management
functions. Furthermore, we discuss the various
technological, business, and legal mechanisms
to overcome like fault tolerance, free riding be-
havior, denial up service attack, access control,
and usage tracking. We conclude that integrating
DRM into a P2P network gives content provid-
ers the secure, legal and most cost-efficient and
user-friendly digital distribution channel they
have been searching for.
the fIrst hurdle:
dIgItal dIstrIButIon
choice Between client-server and
peer-to-peer
Computer systems can be classified into two
groups: centralized or stand-alone systems, and
distributed or network systems. This chapter
defines a digital content distribution system as a
distributed computer system enabling the delivery
or exchange of digital content from one computer
to another. Figure 1, adapted from Milojicic et al.
(2002), provides a good classification of computer
systems with respect to digital content distribu-
tion systems.
Distributed systems consist of different com-
ponents located at networked computers, which
communicate, collaborate, and coordinate actions
such as sharing resources or content. There are
many examples of distributed systems (Nelson,
2002) at various scales such as LAN, Intranet,
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