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A digital rights management system based on a scalable blockchain

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A Correction to this article was published on 25 March 2021

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Abstract

Even though the Internet promotes data sharing and transparency, however it does not protect digital content. In today’s digital world, it has become a difficult task to release a DRM (Digital Rights Management) system that can be considered well-protected. Digital content that becomes easily available in open-source environments will in time be worthless to the creator. There may only be a one-time payment to creators upon initial upload to a given platform after which time the rights of the intellectual property are shifted to the platform itself. However, due to the online availability of content, anyone can download content and make copies. The value of digital content slowly decreases, because the value of content can usually be determined through the difficulty of it’s accessibility. There is no way to track the leakage or copyright for the spread of digital material. In this paper, a distributed media transaction framework for DRM is proposed, which is based on the digital watermarking and a scalable blockchain model. In this paper, our focus is on improving the classic blockchain systems to make it suitable for a DRM model. The DRM model in this paper allows only authorized users to use online content and provide original multimedia content. While the digital watermarking is used to reclaim the copyright ownership of offline contents in the event when the contents are leaked.

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Acknowledgments

The work of Ashutosh Dhar Dwivedi and Anwar Hasan is supported by University of Waterloo, Canada. Abba Garba and Zhong Chen is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China Grant No. 61672060 and Gautam Srivastava is supported by the grant Natural Sciences Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grant program (RGPIN-2020-05363).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies (Peking University), MoE, Beijing, China

    Abba Garba & Zhong Chen

  2. Department of Computer Science and Technology, EECS, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Abba Garba & Zhong Chen

  3. Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark

    Ashutosh Dhar Dwivedi

  4. Department of Electrical Engineering, National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences, Peshawar, Pakistan

    Mohsin Kamal & Muhammad Tariq

  5. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Brandon University, Brandon, R7A 6A9, Canada

    Gautam Srivastava

  6. Research Center for Interneural Computing, China Medical University, Taichung, 40402, Taiwan, Republic of China

    Gautam Srivastava

  7. Princeton University, Princeton, USA

    Mohsin Kamal & Muhammad Tariq

  8. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada

    M. Anwar Hasan

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  1. Abba Garba
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  2. Ashutosh Dhar Dwivedi
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  3. Mohsin Kamal
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  4. Gautam Srivastava
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  5. Muhammad Tariq
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  6. M. Anwar Hasan
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  7. Zhong Chen
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Correspondence to Gautam Srivastava or Zhong Chen.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection: Special Issue on Blockchain for Peer-to-Peer Computing

Guest Editors: Keping Yu, Chunming Rong, Yang Cao, and Wenjuan Li

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Garba, A., Dwivedi, A.D., Kamal, M. et al. A digital rights management system based on a scalable blockchain. Peer-to-Peer Netw. Appl. 14, 2665–2680 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-020-01023-z

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