Fight Piracy With a Blockchain-Based Bounty System, Suggest Microsoft Researchers

TorrentFreak reports:A new paper published by Microsoft's research department proposes to tackle piracy with a blockchain-based bounty system titled "Argus." The system allows volunteers to report piracy in exchange for a reward. It uses the Ethereum blockchain and is transparent, practical, and secure, while limiting abusive reports and errors... Pirated content is traced back to the source through a unique watermark that corresponds with a secret code. When a pirated copy is reported, the status of the source (licensee) is changed to "accused." The system provides an appeal option, but if that fails, the accused status changes to "guilty...." Whether Microsoft has any plans to test the system in the wild is unknown. It theoretically works with various media types including images, audio and software... This idea isn't completely new, however, as the South African company Custos came up with a similar idea years ago. Microsoft's research notes that Argus is superior to Custos' solution as it can assess the severity of piracy and the strength of accusations. TorrentFreak points out that the paper also received input from researchers at Alibaba and Carnegie Mellon University. I like how the paper referenced the appropriately-named functions for parts of the process, including Report(), Appeal(), and SetGuilty().

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