PLI: A New Framework to Protect Digital Content for P2P Networks

In this paper, we first propose a novel Public License Infrastructure (PLI) that uses cryptographic threshold secret sharing schemes to provide decentralized public license services for the Digital Rights Management (DRM). This distributed PLI replaces the centralized license server in a conventional DRM system. PLI offers many advantages such as intrusion and fault tolerance, flexibility, scalability, reliability, high availability. We then propose a PLI-based DRM system to provide content protection and digital rights management for users of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks. This DRM system is especially useful for small content providers such as peers in a P2P network who cannot afford the conventional server/client based DRM system and traditional distribution channels.