A digital rights management system based on a scalable blockchain

• Published in: Peer-to-peer networking and applications Vol. 14; no. 5; pp. 2665 - 2680
• Main Authors: Garba, Abba, Dwivedi, Ashutosh Dhar, Kamal, Mohsin, Srivastava, Gautam, Tariq, Muhammad, Hasan, M. Anwar, Chen, Zhong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.09.2021; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Blockchain; Communications Engineering; Computer Communication Networks; Copy protection; Copyright; Cryptography; Data retrieval; Digital rights management; Digital watermarking; Digital watermarks; Engineering; Information Systems and Communication Service; Multimedia; Networks; Signal,Image and Speech Processing; Special Issue on Blockchain for Peer-to-Peer Computing; Networks; Scalability; Digital rights management; Watermark; Unexpanded shares; Blockchain
• ISSN: 1936-6442; 1936-6450
• DOI: 10.1007/s12083-020-01023-z

Even though the Internet promotes data sharing and transparency, however it does not protect digital content. In today’s digital world, it has become a difficult task to release a DRM (Digital Rights Management) system that can be considered well-protected. Digital content that becomes easily available in open-source environments will in time be worthless to the creator. There may only be a one-time payment to creators upon initial upload to a given platform after which time the rights of the intellectual property are shifted to the platform itself. However, due to the online availability of content, anyone can download content and make copies. The value of digital content slowly decreases, because the value of content can usually be determined through the difficulty of it’s accessibility. There is no way to track the leakage or copyright for the spread of digital material. In this paper, a distributed media transaction framework for DRM is proposed, which is based on the digital watermarking and a scalable blockchain model. In this paper, our focus is on improving the classic blockchain systems to make it suitable for a DRM model. The DRM model in this paper allows only authorized users to use online content and provide original multimedia content. While the digital watermarking is used to reclaim the copyright ownership of offline contents in the event when the contents are leaked.