Microsoft and Alibaba are collaborating to develop an anti-piracy solution based on Ethereum.
The software behemoth of the United States According to a report published by Microsoft’s research department, the company is trying to implement anti-piracy mechanisms on Ethereum based on research from Chinese internet giant Alibaba and Carnegie Mellon University.
Microsoft said the new system, codenamed “Argus,” would be built in collaboration with Alibaba and Carnegie Mellon and will run on a public blockchain while maintaining the anonymity of piracy informants. According to Microsoft, one of the primary problems in establishing such a network was striking a balance between privacy and transparency.
Argus’s “proof of leakage” system allows pirated content to be tracked back to its original source using a watermark technique, ensuring that the same material cannot be reported more than once without truly owning it. To address concerns about the Ethereum network’s high transaction costs, or “gas fees,” the team optimized several cryptographic operations to “ensure the cost of piracy reporting is reduced to the equivalent of sending about 14 ETH-transfer transactions to run on the public Ethereum network, as opposed to thousands of transactions.”
Microsoft has long been a victim of software piracy. In 2018, then-CEO Steve Ballmer lamented that only 1% of businesses in China who used Microsoft Office paid for it, costing the Seattle company US$10 billion in annual profits. Alibaba’s Taobao online marketplace has encountered a distinct set of difficulties, having been placed on the United States Trade Representative’s blacklist in 2016 for selling counterfeit goods.
Ant Group, Alibaba’s fintech subsidiary, was named among China’s top industrial businesses in 2020 and has been significantly involved in blockchain research and the Chinese central bank’s e-CNY digital currency initiative. Microsoft and Intel announced a collaboration in May to develop a threat detection technology aimed at combating crypto-jacking malware.
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