Digital copyright has always been the hot property of block chain. It has natural advantages: native online, there is no online offline closed loop.

The definition of copyright has also been expanded in the digital age.

In addition to the traditional right of reproduction, distribution and information network transmission, digital copyright also adds the right of access to the works without the permission of the author, the right of public communication including the right of transmission, the right of projection and the right of information network transmission, and the right of deduction including adaptation, translation and annotation.

The future and limitations of digital copyright still lie in “protection” and “transaction”.

Unlike the financial field and blockchain have many combinations, digital copyright in the blockchain technology imagination is still very large, the depth and breadth of which has not been fully explored.

In March, Ali Music signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Merlin, an independent music digital rights agency. Ali Music has publicly declared that it hopes to provide all-round protection for the legal rights and interests of independent music companies, musicians and music works through AI and blockchain technology.

During the six months, Ali Music did not disclose its progress on blockchain. It was not until a few days ago at the “Cloud Conference” that Ali Music and TASchain founder Wu Yiqun talked about blockchain + digital rights in public.

The meat of “DIGITAL rights + blockchain” is sweet, but there is more than one Wolf.

Overseas, Intel has filed a patent application for digital rights based on blockchain, and Spotify acquired Mediachain, a data solution based on blockchain, in April last year.

In the blink of an eye, in addition to the use of private key copyright protection Huawei, Baidu is also in the compensation of Oriental IC image copyright 210,000, the online image copyright service platform based on block chain.

On the one hand, there is the threat of open and sharing in the Internet era. On the other hand, the current situation of copyright protection cannot be ignored. Whether digital copyright can adapt to the transformation and whether multi-stakeholder distribution is fair, many people turn the pen to “blockchain technology” to write the answer.

1

Symptomatic digital rights

The development of the Internet, P2P and digitalization makes it more convenient to copy and distribute content, which leads to lower costs for unauthorized use, copy and dissemination.

In the existing digital copyright protection area, there are problems such as registration and confirmation of rights and lack of investigation and evidence collection means. And in the trading world, digital rights have not become more transparent or fair because of digitization and networking.

Traditional digital rights Management (DRM) is a process in which publishers use a series of information technologies to protect the digitalization of copyrighted content and the supply of network information services and control the use of digital content and equipment after being sold. The core idea is to control users’ access, change, share, copy, print and save files by means of user license, so as to protect the rights and interests of content suppliers (copyright owners).

It is worth noting that DRM technology is mostly independently developed by publishers, and the technology is incompatible with each other, so it is easy to form multiple copyright centers. Jobs once issued an open letter on February 6, 2007, in which he said that DRM still could not guarantee that songs purchased from big companies would not be pirated, and that users using DRM technology were more prone to disclosure of privacy information and other information.

Blockchain technology has brought digital rights to the attention of its innovation in terms of credibility. As a new disruptive technology, blockchain integrates a number of basic technologies, such as distributed accounting, immutable, smart contract, and so on, and appears as a mechanism to promote trust between strangers.

For copyright protection, there have been mature exploration at home and abroad, and more and more companies are applying blockchain technology to their own fields. Sweden’s Spotify, a legitimate streaming music service, uses blockchain technology to track royalty payments, ensuring that creators and rights holders are paid accordingly. Behind the scenes, “platforms don’t know who to pay for creative work”.

This issue was also addressed at the recently concluded “Cloud Conference ali Music special.” TASchain Wu Yiqun, who participated in the “music industry blockchain” discussion with Ali Music, mentioned that the current copyright market is not particularly healthy.

The big copyright owners, in the layer by layer distribution, they are the biggest beneficiaries. And the artist they can not get a lot of income, they still have to rely on commercial performance to get income.

Referring to the combination of blockchain and digital rights in digital music, Wu yiqun said that this is also something he has been thinking about since the beginning of xiami.

If you look it up on the Internet, we got a patent for the first shrimp. At that time, we thought, with more and more small studios and independent labels, is it possible for these independent labels and fans to jointly operate and maintain a node network? In this case, the platform may be more of a content distribution and aggregation.

If blockchain is used to build this system, then centralized services may be less functional. The advantage of this is that smaller studios and artists are willing to come in and play the game. They see how many times their songs have been listened to, how many times they have been downloaded. That is, they can confirm that a song is their own. Such a system is only fair, not that any one platform has the final say.

The reality is the same. In the music industry, as the first “content producer” (lyricist, composer, producer) of input and output, it is also the last one to receive revenue.

They don’t know how their royalties are calculated, nor do they have access to how people listen to music, including “how”, “how much” and “how much I get paid”.

2

** “decentralization” maintains digital rights **

The decentralized nature of the blockchain is that its nodes are scattered, open and peer-to-peer, which ensures that data generated on any block is broadcast from that node to other nodes for validation, and that the validation results are stored on all nodes simultaneously.

In contrast to centralized copyright confirmation, copyright confirmation on a blockchain chain is supervised and protected by all nodes. For digital copyright tampering, change, need to get the consent of all nodes in the network. This makes digital copyright infringement extremely expensive and leads to the “immutable and verifiable” nature of blockchain.

In verifiable terms, blockchain often uses “truly random numbers”. So far most of the true random numbers are collected atmospheric noise, there are still some foreign websites selling atmospheric noise random number. These companies claim to be selling truly random numbers, not numbers gleaned from antenna atmospheric noise.

With a random number like 010101, the user has no way to verify that it is truly random and can only trust the company to do no evil. TASchain founder Wu Yiqun also emphasized at the “Cloud Computing Conference” that

As of today, it takes at least two machines three steps to generate a truly random number, which is no longer possible to optimize.

When it comes to blockchain, “hashes” are often mentioned. A hash is a verifiable random number, and if you provide the plain text of the original generated hash, others can immediately verify that the hash is reliable.

With these features, blockchain technology can solve the trust problem of strangers.

In the face of digital copyright is widely criticized as “unfair and opaque”, blockchain can make more people, including music producers, know the rights to their works, changes and so on. However, the on-chain confirmation cost of blockchain is low, which can save a lot of manpower, material resources and operating costs. At the same time, its broadcasting efficiency to all nodes is high and almost instantaneous, which further simplifies the process of offline copyright confirmation.

3

** Copyright transactions for “smart Contracts” **

After the confirmation of digital copyright, the final trend is still the transaction of copyright.

In blockchain, users can buy copyrighted works they want by putting in a series of smart contracts that set up automatic payments directly to the copyright owner. Once a user shares content with others, the paid revenue generated by such sharing behavior will also be allocated to the corresponding smart contract.

Through smart contracts, copyright transactions can form a good closed loop, avoiding the possible drawbacks of third-party participation, ensuring the fairness and transparency of digital copyright transactions, and changing the situation of “being cut”, where content producers used to be weak.

In fact, this confusion is caused by the market, and it is difficult for copyright companies and online music service platforms to ensure that royalties are paid to the right people at the right amount. In traditional copyright trading, a work is often sold separately, at different times and on different platforms.

With blockchain technology, the transaction information generated during the buying and selling of Copyrights is packaged into a new block, and the transaction data is broadcast to all blocks of the same class.

“Color palettes” are now widely used in online literature circles to determine whether a writer is plagiarizing. The so-called “color palette” refers to the comparison of texts suspected of plagiarism and the use of the same background color to mark the same content.

On the other hand, blockchain effectively records all process information of the content producer from the beginning to the completion of the work. Once infringement occurs, it can track it in the first time and at the lowest cost, reduce the input-output ratio of copyright protection, and protect the basic rights and interests of the originator and the right holder.

On the same topic of rights protection, TASchain founder Wu Yiqun also mentioned in the “Cloud Conference · Ali Music Special”,

In the way of block chain, the whole process or contract system is solidified in the block chain system electronically from the beginning. That any party breach of contract, as long as provide enough evidence, finally according to the process of automatic execution. In this way, the cost of the reverse process is greatly reduced.

On the one hand, the copyright ownership of content producers is guaranteed, on the other hand, the transaction between online music service platforms and copyright owners is more fair and transparent. At present, blockchain and digital copyright marriage, there is still a lot of imagination.

4

The resources

References:

① Li Yuehong: Research on Legal Issues of Digital Copyright, Publishing Wide Angle, 2016, No. 8, page 1.

Ma Zhiguo, Liu Hui: Construction of Digital Copyright Governance System from the Perspective of Blockchain Technology

③ “2018 China Digital Rights Industry Market Analysis Report” by EURong Research Center

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