SPIES: Secret Protection Incentive-based Escrow System

Once electronic content has been released, it is very difficult to prevent perfect copies of the content from being widely distributed, which can cause economic harm to the content’s owner and others. We focus on content which is to be shared to a limited extent, which is valuable, and which only needs to be protected for a limited amount of time, such as trade secrets. For such content we provide an economic incentive to limit sharing, without using DRM or watermarking. In our protocol, a quantity of money is placed in escrow, and anyone can get a portion of it by providing proof of knowledge of the content. Since payments become smaller as more individuals give proof, it is in the interest of those with access to the content to prevent further sharing.