Research on digital copyright protection based on the hyperledger fabric blockchain network technology

Yanhui Liu; Jianbiao Zhang; Shupei Wu; Muhammad Salman Pathan

doi:10.7717/peerj-cs.709

Research on digital copyright protection based on the hyperledger fabric blockchain network technology

PeerJ Comput Sci. 2021 Sep 17:7:e709. doi: 10.7717/peerj-cs.709. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Yanhui Liu^{1

2}, Jianbiao Zhang^{1

2}, Shupei Wu², Muhammad Salman Pathan^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Beijing Key Laboratory of Trusted Computing, Beijing, China.
² Faculty of Information Technology, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, China.

Abstract

With the recent development in network technology over a few years, digital works can be easily published online. One of the main issues in the field of digital technology is the infringement of digital works, which can seriously damage the data owners' rights and affects the enthusiasm of the owners to create original work. Thus, more attention is required for the protection of digital copyright as it has a great impact on the development of society. Many digital copyright protection techniques were developed in the past, but still, there are many loopholes in the protection systems to be covered. The protection means are still relatively weak, timeliness is poor, infringement is frequent, a right determination is cumbersome, and the results are not ideal. Aiming at the mentioned problems, this paper proposes a protection technique, which can realize the automatic management of the complete digital rights life cycle on the blockchain using fabric's smart contract technology. The proposed system is based on blockchain technology, which leverages the distributed, tamper-proof and traceable characteristics of blockchain. The system uses smart contracts to manage the full life cycle of digital copyright. The test results show that the proposed system provides effective protection of the digital copyright system and can efficiently confirm the rights of digital copyright.

Keywords: Blockchain; Consortium blockchain; Copyright protection; Digital copyright; Smart contract.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the 2021 Beijing Natural Science Foundation (No. M21038). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.