A design of digital rights management mechanism based on blockchain technology

Abstract

Digital rights management (DRM) has been widely used in digital content protection nowadays and has made a great contribution to the protection of digital content. However, the traditional DRM technology has several disadvantages such as centralization, non-transparency of copyright information and transaction information. Centralized servers are vulnerable to be attacked and opaque information is not user-friendly. The blockchain technology which has emerged in recent years has the advantages of decentralization, collective maintenance, security, and reliability. It can be a great solution to the above problems. In this paper, we propose a design of DRM Mechanism based on blockchain technology. We record the copyright transaction information and license information on the blockchain to make information transparent and safe. We use smart contact to ensure the reliability of copyright transaction and issue licenses automatically, which eliminates the need for centralized servers to verify identities and issue licenses. Our mechanism allows copyright owners to set prices for different content usage rules as they wish. Customers choose the usage rules they would like to purchase flexibly. We also design a blockchain based license structure, which is close to the current DRM standards and easy to be promoted.