Modifiable digital content protection in P2P

Abstract

Today, the Internet and digital technologies lead to illegal reproduction and spread of digital content. Since a copy of digital content is identical with the original, it is difficult to protect the copyright of its creator. In addition, P2P applications like Napster, Gnutella, KaZaA, and so on have accelerated the illegal sharing of digital content. Moreover, a user in P2P can not only be the reader of content, but also the creator and the writer of content. But current technologies like digital watermarking and digital right management does not meet these characteristics, because of their weaknesses such as the allowance of unauthorized viewing in digital watermarking and targeting only the unmodifiable content in digital right management. In this paper, we propose a framework for copyright protection of digital content in a P2P environment. We present a framework where anyone can create and modify a digital content and has the copyright of his contribution with maintaining the copyrights of previously participated contributors. The proposed framework is compared with previous related works such as digital watermarking, XML security, and digital right management. © Springer-Verlag 2004.