P2P commercial digital content exchange

The emergence of popular peer-to-peer (P2P) based systems such as Napster and Kazaa, for the exchange of music files and other content, has demonstrated that P2P is a viable model for content delivery, but flawed with content theft. The Internet is now a major distribution channel for digital goods and services. Consequently, it has also developed into a medium for the communication of information required to complete monetary transactions. These monetary transactions are made difficult in the P2P domain, where the infrastructure and its participants are not trusted. We describe our concept of cascading payments to ensure all participants in a P2P content exchange network are compensated, followed by a detailed description of our CasPaCE framework, which enables cascading payments and ensures that transactions are carried out in a trusted and secure manner. The CasPaCE framework implements an Overlay network of 'bank' peers which ensures non-repudiation of payment as well as content delivery in the P2P content exchange network.