Paper 2019/1217

A Scalable Blockchain Based Digital Rights Management System

Ashutosh Dhar Dwivedi

Abstract

The internet has the main advantage of transparent and sharing, but on the other hand, it has a disadvantage that digital contents are not protected. Due to the online environment, it is not easy to achieve a well protected Digital Rights Management System. Any digital content that is freely allowed to spread online have zero value. The content provider only gets a one-time profit when they upload their work to a platform and transfer the right of the production to the platform. Now the platform is assumed to hold the right. But due to the online availability of content, anyone can download it and can make various copies. After this, the value of the digital content becomes zero, because the value can only be determined by the difficulty of access to the content. There is no way to track the leakage or copyright to the spread of digital material. Anyone is allowed to use it for their purpose. In this paper, we propose a distributed media transaction framework for digital rights management(DRM) scheme based on digital watermarking and scalable blockchain network model. The first generation of blockchain technology is suffering from high latency, low throughput, high transaction cost, high energy and high computational power consumption as well as centralization due to mining pools. In this paper, we mainly focus on removing or improving all these issues from the original blockchain system to make it suitable for our digital rights management model. Our model allows only authorized user to use online contents and provide original multimedia contents. The DRM also take care of digital contents and keep track records of required content modification, copyright transfer or other transaction trails related to multimedia data. We use digital watermarking to reclaim the uniqueness and copyright ownership of the off-line content once it is leaked.

Note: I want to withdraw this eprint from IACR as we have extended this work with other authors and this eprint is creating problem for few journals due to plagiarism issue with this eprint.