CasPaCE: A Framework for Cascading Payments in Peer-to-Peer Digital Content Exchange

Peer-to-peer (P2P) has become a viable model for content exchange over the Internet in the last few years and consequently there is a need for a framework to incorporate payment services in this environment to enable paid content delivery via P2P systems; whereby individual content owners may be compensated for their work whilst at the same time keeping in sync with the inherent properties of a P2P environment. Our research focuses on the identification of the requirements for this framework and how to implement it. This paper proposes a P2P Content Exchange Application, which facilitates content exchange in return for payments, where a system of cascading payments is used to ensure participants are compensated via a system of royalties and commissions and how these would flow through the system.