Microsoft Considers Using Ethereum’s Blockchain To Fight Piracy

Microsoft considers using Ethereum’s blockchain to start fighting piracy, relying on the transparency that this blockchain offers so let’s read more in our latest Ethereum news today.

Windows operating system and the Office productivity suite were the top performers on any software piracy platform so it doesn’t come as a surprise that Microsoft considers using Ethereum’s blockchain to fight piracy. The new paper released by Microsoft’s research department with the participation of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Alibaba, studied a blockchain-based incentive system to bolster the anti-piracy campaigns. The title of the research “Argus: A Fully Transparent Incentive System for Anti-Piracy Campaigns” suggests that the new system by Microsoft relies on transparency aspects of blockchain technology. Built on the Ethereum blockchain, Argus aims to provide a new incentive that will be a trustless mechanism while still protecting data collected from the open anonymous population of the piracy reporters.

“We see this as a distributed system problem. In the implementation, we overcome a set of unavoidable obstacles to ensure security despite full transparency”, the report stated.

Argust enables backtracking of the pirated content to the source with the corresponding watermarks algorithm detailed in the paper. Named Proof of leakage, each report of leaked content involves a new information-hiding procedure. This way, only the informer can report the same watermarked copy without having to own it. The system has incentive-reducing safeguards to prevent informers from reporting the same content that was leaked over and over under different aliases, as the report noted:

“With the security and practicality of Argus, we hope real-world antipiracy campaigns will be truly effective by shifting to a fully transparent incentive mechanism.”

Detailing the issue of the Ethereum network fees, the paper explained that the team optimized more cryptographic operations so that the cost for piracy reporting is lowered to an equivalent cost of sending about 14 ETH-transfer transactions to run on the public ETH network which will otherwise correspond with thousands of transactions. Tech companies across the world have become concerned with protecting intellectual property and fighting digital piracy. As previously reported, Tech Mahindra and the IT subsidiary of Mahindra Group launched a new blockchain-based digital contracts and rights platform on the IBM Huperledger Fabric protocol for the media and entertainment industry.

Source: https://www.dcforecasts.com/ethereum-news/microsoft-considers-using-ethereums-blockchain-to-fight-piracy/