Practical Service Charge for P2P Content Distribution

With emerging decentralized technologies, peer-to-peer (P2P) content distribution arises as a new model for storage and transmission of data. In this scenario, one peer can be playing different roles, either as a distributor or as a receiver of digital contents. In order to incentivize the legal distribution of these contents and prevent the network from free riders, we propose a charging model where distributors become merchants and receivers become customers. To help in the advertisement of digital contents and collection of payment details, an intermediary agent is introduced. An underlying P2P payment protocol presented in [1] is applied to this scenario without total trust on the intermediary agent.