Governed Content Distribution on DHT Based Networks

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems are widely used for sharing digital items without structured metadata and in absence of any kind of digital rights management applied to the distributed contents. In this paper we propose the implementation of a prototype application that makes use of a structured P2P system enabling the indexing of complex metadata, used to express digital rights. In this way the media contents are exchanged and played according to the expressed grants. The creation and the consumption of the shared contents can be performed through any MPEG-21 REL compliant software and the application allows indexing and search for both governed and ungoverned contents. The information about the license can be included in the queries and the P2P network can be used to share governed contents (both free and with fee) in a legitimate way. In particular the proposed approach represents a suitable solution for indexing and querying rights complex structures on DHT based networks.