Potato System and signed media format - an alternative approach to online music business

Thanks to modern compression techniques and increased bandwidth, the distribution of digital music via Internet has become affordable and easy. Many peer-to-peer (P2P) systems show this effect spectacularly. Therefore music publishers rely on so-called strong digital rights management (DRM) systems which restrict and control the usage of their content. We want to discuss a different approach. We introduce a new business model as well as a new file format. The system that we propose is called Potato. In Potato System the users play an active distribution part. Our approach motivates the users to re-distribute content they have paid for and earn money with it. The Potato System pays for any re-distributed file a defined percentage on commission. This allows a fast distribution of new content. The Potato System provides its own P2P clients which contact a central Web service. In the standard Potato System the identity of the last buyer is simply added to the file name. This is sufficient to reward redistributing users. For well known major music we provide the so called signed media format (SMF). In SMF files the user identity is signcrypted into the media content.