Thanks to the World Wide Web, one can now purchase online just about any product sold through conventional avenues: flowers, books, airline tickets, groceries, etc. But true electronic commerce will open new kinds of commercial opportunities. Electronic content distribution, electronic software distribution, enterprise document and workflow management, digital libraries, electronic trading systems, direct advertising and usage tracking, and consumer privacy protection are just some of the opportunities that commerce in virtual space will present. To achieve flexible, predictable electronic commerce, we need to create an environment of distributed trust. Trust is essential to predicting the outcomes of commercial interactions in physical space; trust is even more important in electronic commerce, where interactions are dynamic, anonymous, and global.

To provide distributed trust, InterTrust is developing a distributed peer-to-peer rights management framework. This framework harnesses the abundant computing power available on user's desktops (or in their pockets) to provide a secure processing environment in which to execute electronic contracts. Electronic contracts are small programs whose components are written by the various parties to an agreement, and whose execution controls the use of digital works governed by the agreement. In this talk, we will describe the InterTrust Commerce Architecture and the rationale behind its design. Developing a programming language for expressing electronic contracts involves aspects of programming language theory, secure systems, and user interface design, and we will discuss some of the issues that this problem raises.

This talk will include a demo.