Today, the Internet and digital technologies lead to illegal reproduction and spread of digital content. Since a copy of digital
content is identical with the original, it is difficult to protect the copyright of its creator. In addition, P2P applications
like Napster, Gnutella, KaZaA, and so on have accelerated the illegal sharing of digital content. Moreover, a user in P2P
can not only be the reader of content, but also the creator and the writer of content. But current technologies like digital
watermarking and digital right management does not meet these characteristics, because of their weaknesses such as the allowance
of unauthorized viewing in digital watermarking and targeting only the unmodifiable content in digital right management.
In this paper, we propose a framework for copyright protection of digital content in a P2P environment. We present a framework
where anyone can create and modify a digital content and has the copyright of his contribution with maintaining the copyrights
of previously participated contributors. The proposed framework is compared with previous related works such as digital watermarking,
XML security, and digital right management.
This research was supported by the University IT Research Center Project of Korea.