Protecting Author Royalty of Digital Assets Using Blockchain and Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Abstract

Digital assets are one of the assets that have become an option in the internet era. With the internet’s adoption, many creators create digital assets and sell them via the internet. A proper sales mechanism is needed to tackle this phenomenon. Lack of transparency on sales became a consideration for a creator who wanted to sell an asset in this medium. Most publishers do not honestly publish the number of sales to a creator because all the data is stored privately in the publisher server and can only be accessed by the publisher. This condition can lead to unfair distribution of royalties for the creator. To overcome the centralized system’s weakness, researchers proposed using smart contracts in the public blockchain. In this case, the data link of the digital assets file is kept as plain text in the smart contract, such that the user can directly obtain or copy the digital assets from the smart contract. To overcome this problem, this study uses the Ethereum smart contract for became an intermediate, IPFS for distributing the file, ERC-721 as Token standard ownership on the Ethereum blockchain, and ECC to secure the data link of the digital assets file on the smart contract. Based on the discussion, it is proven that the proposed method can keep the link of the digital assets file secured such that the author can maintain his intellectual property.