Information codes are arranged in pieces comprised of chunks of bytes over a network, such as a Peer-to-Peer overlay network, including a set of peer terminals. A first peer identifies missing chunks in the received pieces and requests such missing chunks from other peers. The chunks are subjected to a fountain code encoding wherein the chunks in a piece are X-ORed. The first peer is therefore capable of reconstructing a received piece encoded with fountain codes from a combination of linearly independent chunks corresponding to the piece. The chunks are transmitted over the network with a connection-less protocol, without retransmission of lost packets, preferably with a UDP protocol.