Keitaide-Music Consortium

Expectations are rising for digital content distribution services such as video clips, music, and games on the network. These are promising services using the ubiquitous environment. A strong protection system of rights, and, at the same time, flexible services are required, which will take advantage of the characteristics of various contents and distribution media, and thus meet users' needs for convenience and costs.

The spotlight is now on file exchange software, called peer-to-peer (P2P), such as Napster and Gnutella, which exchanges data like music data in MP3 format. Napster has a central directory mediating file searches and exchanging files, only storing the files in a way that is like P2P. Gnutella has distributed directories, and individual computers connected to the Internet directly exchange data. No copyright royalties or secondary use fees are paid to the rights holders. As broadband spreads, illegal acts like this are likely to increase. By nature, P2P technology is not limited to file exchanges. This technology can be applied to collaboration systems and distributed computing. It doesn't have servers that loads will concentrate on, making it an appropriate technology for the next generation Internet, which will be large-scale, incorporating home information equipment, as well as computers. This useful P2P technology is portrayed as a villain because it has been used for free exchanges of music files. When P2P is used in UDAC's rights protection, this villain can be turned into the right way to distribute music.
UDAC can make the following into reality: contents are encrypted as they are created, spread to the unused area of the tens of millions of individuals' PCs connected to the network by P2P. The result will be dispersing millions of files of encrypted contents, and licenses (decryption keys) will be provided by license management servers directly connected to the backbone.

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