The major software developer’s latest anti-piracy strategy is based on the transparency provided by blockchain technology.
Windows and the Office productivity suite have historically been among the best performers on software piracy platforms. As a result, it’s unsurprising that Microsoft, the developer of both products, works diligently to implement anti-piracy measures. Microsoft’s research department, in collaboration with researchers from Alibaba and Carnegie Mellon University, published a new paper in which it examined a blockchain-based incentive system for bolstering anti-piracy campaigns.
As the research’s title, “Argus: A Completely Transparent Incentive System for Anti-Piracy Campaigns,” implies, Microsoft’s new system is based on the transparency provided by blockchain technology. Argus is a trustless incentive mechanism built on the Ethereum blockchain that aims to protect data collected from the open anonymous population of piracy reporters.
“We see this as a distributed system problem,” the paper stated, “In the implementation, we overcome a set of unavoidable obstacles to ensure security despite full transparency. With the help of a corresponding watermark algorithm, Argus enables the backtracing of pirated content to its source. Additionally referred to as “proof of leakage,” each report of leaked content involves a data concealment procedure. Thus, no one other than the informer is able to report the same watermarked copy without actually owning it.
Additionally, the system includes incentive-reducing safeguards that prevent an informer from repeatedly reporting the same leaked content under different aliases. “With Argus’s security and practicality, we hope that real-world antipiracy campaigns will become truly effective by implementing a fully transparent incentive mechanism,” the report stated.
The paper explained that the team optimized several cryptographic operations “so that the cost of piracy reporting is reduced to the equivalent of sending approximately 14 ETH-transfer transactions to run on the public Ethereum network, which would otherwise correspond to thousands of transactions.”
Globally, technology companies have become more concerned with protecting intellectual property and combating digital piracy. As previously reported by Cointelegraph, Tech Mahindra, the IT subsidiary of Indian conglomerate Mahindra Group, recently launched a new blockchain-based digital contracts and rights platform for the media and entertainment industry based on IBM’s Hyperledger Fabric protocol.
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