This article addresses the lack of comprehensive studies on Web3 technologies, primarily due to lawyers' reluctance to explore technical intricacies. Understanding the underlying technological foundations is crucial to enhance the credibility of legal opinions. This article aims to illuminate these foundations, debunk myths, and concentrate on determining the legal status of crypto-assets in the context of property rights within the distributed economy. In addition, this article notes that the intangible nature of crypto-assets that derive value from distributed registries, and their resistance to deletion, makes crypto-assets more akin to the autonomy of intellectual property than physical media. The article presents illustrative examples from common law (United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand) and civil law (Germany, Austria, Poland) systems. Proposing a universal solution, it advocates a comprehensive framework safeguarding digital property - data ownership - extending beyond the confines of Web3. This article presents a comprehensive, multi-layered approach to the analysis of tokens as digital content and virtual goods. The approach, universally applicable to various of such goods, scrutinizes property on three distinct layers: first, the rights to the virtual good itself; second, the rights to the assets linked to the virtual good; and third, the rights to the intellectual property intricately associated with the token. Additionally, the paper provides concise analysis of the conflict of laws rules applicable to virtual goods. It also delves into issues concerning formal requirements for the transfer of intellectual property rights, licensing, the first sale (exhaustion) doctrine, the concept of the lawful acquirer, and other crucial aspects of intellectual property in the realm of virtual goods, particularly within the emerging metaverse.
Non-Fungible Tokens NFTs are digitally scarce, non-exchangeable cryptographic tokens that represent an underlying work such as a picture or video and exist on a blockchain, mostly used to trade in digital art and collectibles. They are the most recent blockchain development and offer a great deal of promise for the future in numerous sectors. Despite this they are unregulated and suffer from a bad reputation and illegitimacy that exists across current public blockchains and cryptocurrency, due to fraudulent actors and misconceptions of what is owned with an NFT. In this paper I posit that NFTs could be used to upgrade Digital Rights Management (DRM) through two possible solutions; a copyright register on a blockchain or moving DRM to blockchain – Distributed Digital Rights Management (DDRM). The objective of these solutions is to solve the ongoing problem of digital piracy, which DRM has never been successful in stopping through present-day encryption or content-blocking services. The other benefit is for authors to be guaranteed fair remuneration for their works by cutting out some unnecessary intermediaries and issuing licences through smart contracts. I consider that if successful, these solutions constitute an evolution of digital copyright protection, though they must first overcome legal, practical, and logistical problems. For either solution to be successful, smart contracts must be able to constitute valid legal contracts with binding obligations as all NFTs contain these to execute terms set by the person creating the token (minter). I show that under current Scots law and under England and Wales contract law smart contracts can satisfy formation requirements of a contract, but they still must overcome the challenges presented by blockchain and a lack of intermediaries such as an established dispute resolution mechanism. I demonstrate in this paper that current digital copyright protection could be upgraded with the use of NFTs, specifically in giving authors direct control over the following DRM functions for which previously they were beholden to intermediaries: Assignment; Licensing; Royalty payments; and Registration. Despite this I outline that each solution must overcome some significant challenges, leading me to conclude that a blockchain copyright register utilising NFTs is not likely to be attempted in the near future but could offer huge benefits for exploiters as well as authors. DDRM is a solution already being developed by RAIRtech and is by its nature an idea that numerous companies can compete to develop best. In the final analysis I conclude that despite their issues NFTs <em>are </em>the evolution of digital copyright protection. The bar has been set relatively low with current DRM, meaning an improvement would constitute an evolution, which is evidenced by the lack of reliable ownership information, authors’ options for revenue, and present-day piracy statistics. <em>This working paper is a part of the "Outstanding LLM Dissertations 2022".</em>
Haoxian Chen, Lan Lu, Brendan Massey, Yuepeng Wang · 5 authors
Smart contracts manage a large number of digital assets nowadays. Bugs in these contracts have led to significant financial loss. Verifying the correctness of smart contracts is, therefore, an important task. This paper presents an automated safety verification tool, DCV, that targets declarative smart contracts written in DeCon, a logic-based domain-specific language for smart contract implementation and specification. DCV proves safety properties by mathematical induction and can automatically infer inductive invariants using heuristic patterns, without annotations from the developer. Our evaluation on 20 benchmark contracts shows that DCV is effective in verifying smart contracts adapted from public repositories, and can verify contracts not supported by other tools. Furthermore, DCV significantly outperforms baseline tools in verification time.
The system proposed in this study uses zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) to verify the traceability of wood recorded in a public blockchain. Wood is a byproduct of several states, ranging from standing trees to logs, lumber, and wood products (hereinafter ``wood objects''). The advantage of using the blockchain for record keeping is that participants can freely record the information at their discretion, without any restrictions. However, the openness of the blockchain may allow a malicious third party to introduce disinformation. In this study, we employ ZKP and near-field communication (NFC) chips to eliminate the possibility of disinformation introduction. ZKP is used to prove/validate changes in the state of wood objects, and the unique nonce associated with that state is encrypted and recorded on an NFC chip. The nonce is concealed and id of the wood object is defined as hash value of this nonce. We developed a prototype system based on an Android application and an Ethereum smart contract. We confirm that wood traceability and verification can be performed using the prototype system.
Open access
2 source records
Digital Rights Management and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Youwei Huang, Sen Fang, Jianwen Li, Bin Hu · 6 authors
In recent years, research in software security has concentrated on identifying vulnerabilities in smart contracts to prevent significant losses of crypto assets on blockchains. Despite early successes in this area, detecting developers' intents in smart contracts has become a more pressing issue, as malicious intents have caused substantial financial losses. Unfortunately, existing research lacks effective methods for detecting development intents in smart contracts. To address this gap, we propose \textsc{SmartIntentNN} (Smart Contract Intent Neural Network), a deep learning model designed to automatically detect development intents in smart contracts. \textsc{SmartIntentNN} leverages a pre-trained sentence encoder to generate contextual representations of smart contracts, employs a K-means clustering model to identify and highlight prominent intent features, and utilizes a bidirectional LSTM-based deep neural network for multi-label classification. We trained and evaluated \textsc{SmartIntentNN} on a dataset containing over 40,000 real-world smart contracts, employing self-comparison baselines in our experimental setup. The results show that \textsc{SmartIntentNN} achieves an F1-score of 0.8633 in identifying intents across 10 distinct categories, outperforming all baselines and addressing the gap in smart contract detection by incorporating intent analysis.
We propose VetSC, a novel UI-driven, program analysis guided model checking technique that can automatically extract contract semantics in DApps so as to enable targeted safety vetting. To facilitate model checking, we extract business model graphs from contract code that capture its intrinsic business and safety logic. To automatically determine what safety specifications to check, we retrieve textual semantics from DApp user interfaces. To exclude untrusted UI text, we also validate the UI-logic consistency and detect any discrepancies. We have implemented VetSC and applied it to 34 real-world DApps. Experiments have demonstrated that VetSC can accurately interpret smart contract code, enable autonomous safety vetting, and discover safety risks in real-world Dapps. Using our tool, we have successfully discovered 19 new safety risks in the wild, such as expired lottery tickets and double voting.
Property law in the twentieth century moved from the law of things to the law of rights in things. This was a process of fragmentation: Under Hohfeldian property, we conceive of property as a bundle of sticks, and those sticks can be moved to different holders; the right to possess can be separated from the record ownership right, for example. The downside of Hohfeld’s model is that physical objects — things — become informationally complicated. Thing-ness constrains the extravagances of Hohfeldian property: although we can split off the right to possess from the right to exclude, use, destroy, copy, manage, repair, and so on, there is a gravitational pull to tie these sticks back into a useful bundle centered on the asset, the thing. Correspondingly, there has been an “informational turn” to property law, looking at the ways in which property law serves to limit property forms to reduce search costs, and to identify and celebrate the informational characteristics of thing-ness. The question of thing-ness came to a head in the context of digital and smart assets with the formation of non-fungible tokens. NFTs were attempts to generate and sell “things” a conceptually coherent something that can contain a loose bundle of rights. The project was an attempt to re-create thingness by an amalgam of cryptography, game theory, and intellectual property. This essay discusses thing-ness in the context of digital assets, how simulated thing-ness differs from physical thing-ness, and the problems that arise from attempts to reify digital assets.
Roberto Garcı́a, Ana Cediel, Mercè Teixidó, Rosa Gil
Recent initiatives related to the Metaverse focus on better visualization, like augmented or virtual reality, but also persistent digital objects. To guarantee real ownership of these digital objects, open systems based on public blockchains and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are emerging together with a nascent decentralized and open creator economy. To manage this emerging economy in a more organized way, and fight the so common NFT plagiarism, we propose CopyrightLY, a decentralized application for authorship and copyright management. It provides means to claim content authorship, including supporting evidence. Content and metadata are stored in decentralized storage and registered on the blockchain. A token is used to curate these claims, and potential complaints, by staking it on them. Staking is incentivized by the fact that the token is minted using a bonding curve. The tokenomics include the resolution of complaints and enabling the monetization of curated claims. Monetization is achieved through licensing NFTs with metadata enhanced by semantic technologies. Semantic data makes explicit the reuse conditions transferred with the token while keeping the connection to the underlying copyright claims to improve the trustability of the NFTs. Moreover, the semantic metadata is flexible enough to enable licensing not just in the real world. Licenses can refer to reuses in specific locations in a metaverse, thus facilitating the emergence of creative economies in them.
Eldair F. Dornelles, Fernando Parahyba, Rafael Z. Frantz, Fabrícia Roos-Frantz · 8 authors
Several languages have been developed for writing smart contracts for specific domains, such as health, finance, and business processes. However, none of them includes the constructors needed for writing smart contracts used in application integration processes which have their own particularities. Such smart contracts are responsible for monitoring the communication between the process and the applications to guarantee that the rights of the parties involved in the integration process are observed. To cover the gap, this paper discusses a domain-specific language for writing smart contracts in the application integration domain. It provides constructors to write smart contracts with a level of abstraction close to the natural language used in conventional contracts.
Many implementations of smart contracts available in NFT marketplaces today allow the modification of NFT token attributes, without any specific mechanism to control the consistency with off-chain metadata. We believe this is a weakness in overall design of NFTs today. We propose a computation model called the Asset Proxy NFT that guarantees the consistency between the NFT token (on-chain) and its corresponding asset metadata (off-chain). In general, the proposed model can be applied to any type of NFT that requires immutability or controlled mutability of metadata. A second contribution of this paper is the notion of the NFT design patterns which recognizes that a coherent framework for dealing with hybrid assets is required, and that for specific hybrid-asset deployments, suitable technological components must be utilized under the framework.
Cryptoassets such as Bitcoin and Ethereum are widely traded around the world. Cryptocurrencies are also transferred between investors. Cryptocurrency has become a new and attractive means of remittance. Thus, blockchain-based smart contracts also attract attention when central banks design digital currencies. However, it has been discovered that a significant amount of cryptoassets on blockchain are lost or stranded for a variety of reasons, including the loss of the private key or the owner's death. To address this issue, we propose a method for recoverable transactions that would replace the traditional transaction by allowing cryptoassets to be sent to a backup account address after a deadline has passed. We provide the computational workload required for our method by analyzing the prototype. The method proposed in this paper can be considered as a good model for digital currency design, including central bank digital currency (CBDC).
This research study explores the use of near-miss clone detection to support the characterization of domain models of smart contracts for each of the popular domains in which smart contracts are being rapidly adopted. In this paper, we leverage the code clone detection techniques to detect similarities in functions of the smart contracts deployed onto the Ethereum blockchain network. We analyze the clusters of code clones and the semantics of the code fragments in the clusters in an attempt to categorize them and discover the structural models of the patterns in code clones.
César Soto-Valero, Martin Monperrus, Benoît Baudry
The rise of blockchain technologies has triggered tremendous research interest, coding efforts, and monetary investments in the last decade. Ethereum is the single largest programmable blockchain platform today. It features cryptocurrency trading, digital art, and decentralized finance through smart contracts. So-called Ethereum nodes operate the blockchain, relying on a vast supply chain of third-party software dependencies maintained by diverse organizations. These software suppliers have a direct impact on the reliability and the security of Ethereum. In this article, we perform an analysis of the software supply chain of Java Ethereum nodes and distill the challenges of maintaining and securing this blockchain technology.
The hyperledger fabric is a modular blockchain framework used by private companies to develop blockchain-based products, solutions, and applications using plug-and-play components. The smart contracts operating in this framework is created by implementing a chaincode. When implementing a chaincode, there may be a security weakness inside the code, which is the root cause of the security vulnerability. However, when the contract is completed and the block is created, the chaincode cannot be arbitrarily modified, so the security weakness must be analyzed before execution. This paper conducted a study on chaincode intermediate code generation for security weakness analysis of chaincode operating in hyperledger fabric blockchain framework. Analysis of security weaknesses at the source code level is not easy because the code logic is not clear and the complexity is high. On the other hand, security weakness analysis at the intermediate code level is easy to analyze because the code logic of the source code is clearly represented and the complexity is lower than that of the source code.
As the popularity of e-commerce grows, an electronic coupon (e-coupon) is widely used due to its convenience and portability. In most e-coupon services, the information of e-coupons is managed on a centralized server. However, e-coupon services are often vulnerable to security issues because of centralization. For example, when the e-coupon information which is stored in a centralized e-coupon server is forged, it becomes difficult to match the user and the e-coupon’s owner, and an expired e-coupon can be used repetitively (i.e., double-spending). To handle this issue, we propose a new e-coupon service by exploiting a blockchain system to improve the security of the service. To do this, we first design a server to enable the e-coupon service and communicate with the blockchain system. Second, we devise a smart contract on the blockchain system to provide integrity of the e-coupon business logic and the e-coupon’s information. We implemented the proposed service on an Ethereum-based blockchain system. The experimental results show that our proposed service improves higher security with a minor performance overhead compared with an existing e-coupon service.
Creating digital content and distributing them has become much easier and convenient nowadays, where the digital content creator can create the content and also distribute their work to others from anywhere with the help of internet. This also has the risk as the content is distributed using internet, the risk being copyright infringement and illegal distribution of the content. To avoid these types of risks the content creators are opting towards the help of digital rights management. The digital rights management team provides help and support to the content creators in cases where their work is illegally copied or distributed. To get the digital content copyrighted is also not an easy task as it consumes time and money. The proposed model overcomes these issues by integrating digital signature, structure similarity index measurement (SSIM) and blockchain technology in the digital rights management life cycle. The digital signature is used to uniquely identify the user and the related information can be traced back to the user using digital signature, and the copyright is provided using the SSIM method. The SSIM value can be in the range of -1 to 1 where 1 denotes that both the media files are identical and the system updates this information so that all the participant can view this information. If the SSIM value after comparing both the media files is -1 then the both images are unique and authentic, then the copyright is provided for the media file and this information is updated in the system as well as Ethereum blockchain. This makes the system more secure, robust and transparent.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The DSM Directive preserves, on the one hand, the public domain, by restricting copyright in faithful reproductions of public domain works. On the other hand, there are copyright opportunities for digital art and non-fungible tokens. The Directive also creates opportunities for preservation and digitization for cultural heritage institutions. There are opportunities there that can be put to good and productive use in the interest of all parties involved. Extended collective licensing and measures for out-of-commerce works can also play a role here. And moral rights will not be a hindrance in that respect if industry standards of the digital era are observed. It is therefore important to continue and to strengthen the dialogue between the cultural heritage institution community on the one hand and the copyright and related rights community on the other hand.
With the rapid development of digitization technology, digital copyright of museum has become more and more valuable. Its collections can be opened to and shared with the people through the Internet. However, centralized authorization, untransparent transaction information and risk of tampering data in traditional digital rights management have a strong impact on system normal operation. In this paper, we proposed a blockchain-based digital rights management scheme (BMDRM) that realizes a distributed digital rights management and authorization system by introducing non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and smart contracts. To ensure the security and efficiency of transactions and authorization, we store all processing data in a high-security distributed ledger based on cryptographic signatures. We test our scheme on Ethereum private network and the experimental results show that BMDRM is feasible and secure for digital rights management in museums.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The paper aims at determining the utility of NFTs within the current EU framework of copyright, specifically from the authors' perspective. The issues of technical feasibility and scale of adoption remain beyond the scope of the paper; the focus lies rather on the legal aspects, particularly the case law of the CJEU. For authors, the NFT landscape is currently filled with potential economic benefits, as well as perils. With this in mind, the paper anticipates future legislative and judicial interventions in the new area. The paper's answer to whether NFTs could be relevant for copyright law is a resounding "yes", potentially allowing the effortless dissemination of content to finally work in the authors' favor, instead of incurring enforcement costs. Interestingly enough, the answer is justified with the example of tokenized internet memes.