The plans by Microsoft to combat piracy relies on the transparency of blockchain technology.
The Windows operating system and Office productivity suite have traditionally been among the best performers on software piracy marketplaces. So it’s no surprise that Microsoft, the creator of both products, works hard to implement anti-piracy mechanisms.
The Redmond-based software company investigated a blockchain-based incentive system to enhance anti-piracy measures in a recent report produced by Microsoft’s research group, with the assistance of experts from Alibaba and Carnegie Mellon University.
As the study’s title, Argus: A Fully Transparent Incentive Approach for Anti-Piracy Campaigns, implies, Microsoft’s new system is based on the transparency of blockchain technology.
Argus, which is built on the Ethereum blockchain, intends to provide a trustless reward system while also preserving data collected from an open anonymous population of piracy reporters.
According to the article, “We see this as a distributed system problem,” the paper stated, “In the implementation, we overcome a set of unavoidable obstacles to ensure security despite full transparency.”
With a similar watermark algorithm outlined in the study, Argus enables backtracing of stolen content to its source. Each report of leaked content includes an information-hiding technique, which is also known as “proof of leakage.” This manner, no one else can report the identical watermarked duplicate without actually possessing it, save the informer.
The system also includes incentive-reducing features to prevent an informant from repeatedly reporting the same leaked content under different names. “With the security and practicality of Argus, we hope that real-world antipiracy campaigns will be truly effective by shifting to a fully transparent incentive mechanism,” according to the research.
The team streamlined many cryptographic operations “so that the cost for piracy reporting is reduced to an equivalent cost of sending about 14 ETH-transfer transactions to run on the public Ethereum network, which would otherwise correspond to thousands of transactions,” according to the study.
Globally, technology businesses are increasingly concerned with protecting intellectual property and combating digital piracy.
As previously reported by Cointelegraph, Tech Mahindra, the IT division of Indian conglomerate Mahindra Group, recently developed a new blockchain-based digital contracts and rights platform for the media and entertainment industries based on IBM’s Hyperledger Fabric protocol.