Peer-to-peer Content Distribution Using Anonymous Fingerprinting – Proof of Concept

Abstract

Abstract—Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks have emerged as a costefficient multimedia distribution solution in the last few years, but they have also been surrounded by the copyright controversy as they are easily identified with the illegal copying of copyrighted materials. Although some copyright protection systems have been proposed to overcome this drawback, most of them posed a risk to the privacy of legitimate users. Recently, anonymous fingerprinting methods have been proposed using an underlying P2P distribution to combine copyright enforcement (by means of traitor tracing) and the privacy of honest buyers. However, to the best of our knowledge, none of those systems has provided a complete proof of concept to enable the evaluation of the overall solution and its application in a real-world scenario. This paper describes the complete implementation of one of these systems and provides real data obtained from the integration of all its different components, including a real P2P platform. The data obtained from the experiments are no longer theoretical, but based on the results attained with real hardware and software. Thus, this paper is intended to pave the way between theoretical results and a commercial application of the system, bridging the gap between academia and industry, to illustrate the possibilities of transferable research.