Abstract

The technical impact of the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) paradigm on content distribution applications has been proved successful and efficient, when participants cooperation is achieved. Conversely, the business model is not clear: given a copy-protected object, its owner must be paid back for each transaction taking place from a provider to a receiver. The P2P paradigm assumes that a receiver turns into a provider, but it is questionable why she/he should provide properly the content, if the owner wants to be reimbursed. Actual systems introduce fairness, giving incentives (e.g., a differential service, like in BitTorrent) to altruistic peers, with the consequence that the owner of an object is economically damaged everyday. Hence, music and film industry sees P2P techniques as a hostile framework for distributing copy protected content for free: today's answer of the industry is investing in DRM-based solutions, that are not interoperable between different devices and players. In this paper, we present FairPeers, a P2P market framework, that joins a straightforward intellectual property protection and a fair economic model by maintaining the efficiency typical of P2P file sharing systems. The study is completed with an exhaustive security analysis, and the description of a prototype implementation that shows that the P2P paradigm is mature enough to present to the broadest community new revenue models, simply using available tools and state-of-the-art techniques.