Co-Utility For Digital Content Protection And Digital Forgetting

Tracing the flow of content on the Internet is a difficult problem, due to the distributed nature of transactions and the lack of a common legal framework. In order to address two related problems, digital content protection and digital forgetting, we introduce the co-utility concept. A protocol is said to be co-utile if helping the other peers that participate in the protocol to increase their utilities is the way to increase one's own utility. We then present peer-to-peer protocols that leverage co-utility to provide rationally sustainable solutions for the two above-mentioned problems.