Off-Line Viral Economic Systems for Digital Media

  • Shan He ,
  • Renan G. Cattelan ,
  • Kamal Jain ,
  • Darko Kirovski

MSR-TR-2007-166 |

We propose a novel viral platform for building an incentive-based off-line market for digital media. A user who owns a multimedia clip, can resell it to other end-users such that the revenue is controlled by the copyright owner. For each transaction, the seller retains part of the revenue as an incentive for participating in the distributed economy. Transactions can be committed off-line anywhere, anytime, and by anyone who owns a mobile media player equipped with a near-field wireless. In this paper we propose and discuss a cryptographic algorithm based upon atomic receipt exchange as a foundation of the platform. We also showcase the profit-making potential of the new platform via a network simulator and an economic model extrapolated from real-life data.