Blockchain-Based Smart Propertization of Digital Content for Intellectual Rights Protection

Several platform companies have been successful in competing with digital piracy by producing consumer-friendly services. Nowadays, however, the digital content service market has become more monopolized than ever, which forms barriers to the entry of new platform companies. The platform monopoly would cause considerable problems both to content providers and consumers as it limits the choice of consumers. To remove the platform monopoly in digital content markets, we propose a public blockchain-based digital content service method. The proposed method encrypts the digital content to a self-decryptable form, which we call Smart Propertized Digital Content (SPDC), and utilizes the decentralization and traceability of the public blockchain to provide a non-monopolistic ecosystem for the management and distribution of the SPDC license. The proposed method can be more beneficial both to content creators and users than the current winner-takes-all platform model. For instance, users can download SPDC once and play many times without requesting the decryption key, and SPDC owners can make SPDC licenses to be time-limited, device-limited, resellable, or terminated without resorting to help from other intermediaries. We conducted the threat analysis on the proposed method by examining possible attacks in various scenarios. Based on threat analysis, we conclude that the proposed method can provide a new type of digital content service ecosystem that can be operated in a completely decentralized way and neutrally beneficial to all participants.