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to operate, despite proposed bills such as the
Peer-to-Peer Piracy Prevention Act (PPPA) or
stronger law enforcement (Gehrke, Burghardt &
Schumann, 2002). This could even drive users to
“underground” systems, especially, when only one
unprotected copy is made available is sufficient to
be globally distributed (Buhse, 2002). Therefore,
the most effective way for the music industry to
fight against piracy and successfully sell digital
music is to join and provide sites and networks
that become the best source for high quality music
downloads (O'Reilly, 2001).
Whatever the answer to the content provid-
ers' quandary, it must address the following two
questions: First, why should users subscribe to a
DRM supported P2P network to search, purchase
and exchange music files? Second, why should
content providers offer their intellectual property
on such file sharing systems?
For the users, it does not only provide a plat-
form where they can easily and legally search,
purchase, and exchange high quality digital music,
but they are already used to use such neworks.
The proposed framework should provide the legal
platform for an attractive and secure digital music
distribution channel.
For content providers, it must provide the le-
gal, secure, and cost-effective digital distribution
channel that will accurately track sales and usage
data to compensate copyright holders. However,
protecting any digital content in a P2P environ-
ment is difficult without employing some type of
DRM (Lesavich, 2002) and centralized control
(Gehrke, Burghardt, & Schumann, 2002). Thus,
integrating DRM into a P2P network provides the
required legal, secure solution content providers
have been searching for. But, a pure technologi-
cal solution (like DRM) cannot overcome all the
challenges faced with digital music and P2P
networks, such as free-riding. Therefore, business
and legal mechanisms have also to be taken into
account. Only the appropriate mix of these three
mechanisms will enable content providers to sell
successfully digital music.
p2p Based secure digital music
framework
A first attempt to such a network has been pre-
sented by Lesavich (2002) and Kini and Shetty
(2001), but they have not included DRM as well
as other functionalities have been missing. In a
centralized P2P system which is supported by
DRM, digital content is encrypted, a digital wa-
termark is also embedded and finally cataloged
the first time on a content server before it is
made available on the network. This server can
also be seen as a peer to the network acting as
a super node which means, this peer is always
connected to the network and provides many
music files. More specifically this peer “injects”
into the network new released songs and assures
that songs which are not very popular in terms
of storing and sharing among other peers are
still provided in order to assure a high quality
of service. As mentioned previously, the content
and the rights can be managed separately where
metadata can be part of the digital content and
the type of rights and attributes of those rights
granted to the user.
The index server includes a directory of all
digital content available on the network, access
points, available bandwidth, download/upload
speed of peers, and so on. This information
made transparent to all peers, increases the
overall performance of the network. Moreover,
some quality control on the digital content being
traded could also be included in the index server.
The index server increases the authenticity and
integrity of the digital content exchanged over
the P2P network. This would increase the overall
P2P performance (e.g., search time, traffic on the
network) quality of service, and trust of the P2P
network.
Another server is the log server which authen-
ticates the peers when they connect themselves
into the P2P network. This enables the control
of access to the network, and to some extent, to
the content. The user registration information
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