A License Management Model for Peer-to-Peer Music Sharing

The popularity of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing software has created a pressing need for digital music providers to resolve copyright and piracy problems of disseminating digital music through the Internet. Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology ensures protection of rights for distributed music over the Internet. Existing DRM systems emphasize protection based on business-to-consumer (B2C) distribution model, but do not tackle protection on a consumer-to-consumer (C2C) distribution model. This paper proposes a license management model to support not only typical music distribution models from music distributor to consumer (B2C), but also peer consumer to peer consumer (C2C) distribution model. The proposed license management model consists of two types of licenses, namely official licenses and peer licenses. These licenses are to be implemented in XrML. The concepts of these licenses facilitate both B2C and C2C distribution models. Functionality tests of the proposed model with certain common peer-to-peer sharing activities have been conducted.