A TRUSTED P2P SYSTEM FOR PAID OR OTHER CONTENT DELIVERY

摘要

A peer-to-peer content delivery system includes trusted auditors to report inappropriate peer behavior. This permits punishment or banishment. The trusted auditors can mimic peer behavior. The trusted auditors can be used in an existing peer-to-peer system, or in a system in which users share content anonymously via layer of intepnediate nodes. The intermediate nodes can be inhibited from having an entirety of content they help to transfer. Vendors can leverage peer-to-peer transfer capacity and keep the same level of trust of customers as in traditional content distribution models. Infrastructure costs and end-user cost can be lowered. The intermediate nodes can be incentivized to contribute a portion of their transfer capacity, such as via electronic payments, and electronic payment transactions ma be facilitated by a bank service. Efficiency, security or reliability can be enhanced through queuing, pipelining, encryption and direct-download recovery capabilities.