Microsoft’s research department, along with the participation of Alibaba and Carnegie Mellon University researchers, have prepared research that lays out the design, implementation and evaluation to fight piracy issues using Ethereum blockchain

The title of this research is “Argus: A Fully Transparent Incentive System for Anti-Piracy Campaigns,” which consists of 11 long pages of intense efforts to bolster anti-piracy campaigns.

Reports that are filed to Argus will protect the identity of the informers. It will allow the firm to backtrack the source of the pirated content. Argus is dubbed as the "first public anti-piracy system."

The cost for this piracy reporting will be "reduced to an equivalent cost of sending about 14 ETH-transfer transactions," as stated by the company in the research. This price is contrary to the high transaction fees for which Ethereum is known.

“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 paper added.

Argus has been developed to backtrace the source of pirated content with a corresponding watermark algorithm, and this concept has been detailed in the research paper. Each report of leaked content includes an information-hiding procedure. In this way, only the informer will be able to report the duplicate watermarked copy without owning it.

The report states, “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.”

Microsoft, a top performer on most of the software piracy platforms, works hard to establish anti-piracy measures. This newly developed system relies on blockchain technology’s transparency aspect.

The companies such as Microsoft, Apple, and others, have spent a lot of time and money in dealing with piracy and intellectual property theft prevention. Programs like these will provide people with information on individuals or entities such as these illegal activities.

This effort taken by Microsoft highlights the obstacles that technology firms highly face in protecting their intellectual properties. A blockchain, a form of public ledger, has every transaction recorded after it’s authenticated.

Rushali Das

CBW - External Analyst

INDIA