Copyright protection in Peer-to-Peer networks for Video-on-Demand streaming

A method for Peer-to-Peer streaming of Video-on-Demand with residential nodes is described. A possible problem with doing peer-to-peer video-on-demand streaming is the necessity of storing on the disk of the residential user the content to be streamed, allowing a malicious user to distribute illegally the content. The proposed method has the advantage of storing on the user´s disk only a reduced version of the content. Although the reduced version stored in disk can still be used in the proposed peer-to-peer scheme, it is not sufficient to recover the original content, preventing an unauthorized distribution of it.