The Decentralized Rights Locker
This article 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 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 include longevity that is independent of a single standard, company, or governing body as well as security of transactions with cryptographic guarantee of entitlements and grants of content licenses that cannot be changed but can be verified permanently. Lastly, the distributed and replicated nature of the peer-to-peer (P2P) network provides resiliency, eliminating a single point of failure like a company or governing body. This article 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 enabling 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.
- Print ISSN
- 1545-0279
- Electronic ISSN
- 2160-2492
- Published
- 2020-04
- Content type
- Original Research
- Keywords
- Blockchain, content rights, digital rights management (DRM), distributed ledger, Ethereum, library, smart contract, video delivery
- DOI
- 10.5594/JMI.2019.2957687