A Decentralized Proof Framework for Digital Authorship and Ownership

Abstract

Digital art marketplaces have been expanding rapidly, resulting in a greater focus on issues of ownership verification, copyright infringement, and content tampering. Current blockchain non-fungible token (NFT) systems only keep ownership data on the blockchain, with the media files stored off the blockchain, resulting in a lack of trust in the ownership of assets secured by NFTs. This work proposes a framework for verifying the ownership of digital art in a decentralized fashion, using invisible frequency domain watermarks, cryptographic hash functions, and artificial intelligence (AI)-based semantic checks. This results in a method for embedding ownership directly into the image being protected by an NFT, with the cryptographic fingerprint of the image stored on the blockchain for easy access. An AI-based semantic verification layer provides assurance that ownership can only be confirmed by performing consistent content checks. As has been verified through experimentation, the framework developed will allow owners of digital images to preserve ownership of their images and to securely and decentralized verify ownership.