Until now commercial distribution architectures for digital content have been primarily based on centralized systems. P2P networks' capabilities however demonstrate increased reliability, scalability, fault tolerance, load balancing, and performance over centralized solutions. Additionally P2P networks allow the transfer of storage and network costs to their participants. Existing P2P architectures however are "grown" architectures and do not fully exploit available technologies in order to satisfy legal requirements. From a user's point of view it is difficult to understand why the usage of current P2P-networks should be illegal at all. This article investigates the requirements for a P2P-framework that overcomes the previously described drawbacks. The proposed architecture is a framework for the legal distribution of commercial and non-commercial content via P2P networks. It supports a wide-range of business models ranging from shareable (promotional) content to DRM protected commercial content, ensuring legal exchange without centralized content usage controls. The proposed framework exploits technological potentials while at the same time maximizing its usability and attractiveness to users. The framework also ensures that consumers act in a legally acceptable manor and any illegal infractions will be flagged. The system achieves this through a process where each peer observes the peers it is exchanging content with thus increasing the probability of identifying infractions. In addition to addressing the requirements of consumers, content owners and distributors alike, this framework can also incorporate technologies that increase its attractiveness to users by providing additional services like collaborative filtering. In this way users are assured that the content they are accessing is both legal and of commercial quality. In summary, this framework provides a reasonable balance between content owners' rights on content protection and users' requirements on usability and privacy.
