A Licensing and Payment System for Distribution of Digital Content

The ease with which digital content can be copied and distributed is having a dramatic impact on all media industries. Media companies are understandably alarmed at the potential scale of piracy. To date media companies have tried to lock up their content using encryption technology. On it's own, this is fundamentally flawed and will ultimately degrade the customer experience. Instead, a change in the distribution and pricing of digital media is more urgently required. In this report we describe an approach to distribution of digital media that exploits word of mouth recommendation. A licensing system that monitors the distribution and payment of e-Books has been implemented to demonstrate the approach.