Warner Bros. realise the potential of P2P Infrastructure

WSJ reports that Warner Bros. will be using BitTorrent Inc.'s peer-to-peer technology to distribute its movies to legal subscribers. P2P technology has been wrongly percieved as an enabler of illegal distribution of copyrighted data. I have been strongly advocating the use of P2P Infrastructure for scalable, secure and authenticated dissemination of multimedia content. Our research work in context of the project TRIUMF has focused on delivering efficient and practical solutions in this regard. SAMcast protocol is an ongoing research effort at Multimedia Research Lab at UIC. This protocol has following features

• It employs highly scalable P2P communication primitives.
• It uses an efficient content aware assymetric cryptographic protocol for secure dissemination of multimedia data.
• Novel finger printing techniques coupled with efficient water marking procedures provide collusion resistent authenticated content delievery.
  
• Highly efficient and high performance incremental hashing schemes are used for authentication of the multimedia content.
• An incentive based approach encourages users to allow their network resources to be used for P2P commnication based content delivery.

We have also developed a novel solution to the secure aggregation problem in large scale overlay networks. P2P networks have tremendous potential in creating vibrant social communities which in turn provide exciting business opportunities. It is all upto us to create technologies which keep users' trust in the network and in the ever-booming online communities.