Digital Resource Rights Confirmation and Infringement Tracking Based on Smart Contracts

Abstract

The protection of digital resource copyrights has drawn extensive public concern in the past decade. Traditional methods, however, fail to satisfy the requirements due to their poor timeliness, frequent infringement, and cumbersome in rights confirmation, etc. In this paper, we investigate and design a novel approach for cross-platform digital resource rights confirmation and infringement tracking based on smart contracts. We utilize smart contracts to realize rights transactions and protection. As another contribution, we propose to establish fine-grained digital resource rights, which are divided into ownership and usufruct. For tracking infringement acts, we invoke smart contracts to extract the rights transfer chain for resources. Furthermore, we reveal the source of resource leakage by embedding digital watermarks when distributing the resources. By combining resource rights transfer chain and digital watermarking, we can effectively achieve digital resource rights confirmation and infringement tracking. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our proposed method.