The De-centralized Rights Locker

This paper explains how the distributed ledger technology that has successfully decentralized currencies can be used to enable a decentralized marketplace for digital content rights. Today, multiple centralized rights lockers from companies and consortiums offer similar but incompatible systems to register a consumer's video purchases and manage content rights. Each is representing a monopoly that centrally governs the content rights and is motivated to do so only for as long as it remains profitable. — Blockchain technology can be used to establish a permanent, secure, decentralized and distributed registry for content registration, assignment and archival of rights. The benefits of leveraging blockchain for video content distribution and content rights management provide longevity that is independent of a single standard, company or governance body as well as security of transactions with cryptographic guarantee of entitlements and grants of content licenses that cannot be changed and verified permanently. Lastly, the distributed and replicated nature of the peer-to-peer (P2P) network provides resiliency, eliminating a single point of failure as well as the need to rely on just one single standard, company or governance body. This paper will provide a novel system design that explains how a blockchain can be applied to not only manage content rights but to also secure content by including digital rights management (DRM) and playback control as an integral part of the decentralized network. It also details how to improve common ledger technology to overcome concerns of performance and abuse that are relevant to this application.

Published

2018-10

Content type

Original Research

Keywords

Blockchain, distributed ledger, Ethereum, library, smart contract, content rights, video delivery, digital rights management, DRM

DOI

10.5594/M001858

ISBN

978-1-61482-960-7