Microsoft is developing a system based on Ethereum (ETH) to offer a better decentralized incentive system, aiming to fight more effectively against content piracy. Will this bet prove to be a winner?
Reporting pirated content on blockchain: bonus ethers
Microsoft wants to improve its strategy against content piracy by using the blockchain. The new Ethereum-based anti-piracy scheme, dubbed “Argus,” is the result of research detailed in the paper “Argus: a fully transparent incentive system for anti-piracy campaigns,” which involved researchers from Alibaba and Carnegie Mellon University.
Argus proposes a decentralized incentive mechanism aiming at encouraging and automatically rewarding in ethers (ETH) people reporting cases of content piracy which can concern movies, images,… The blockchain must take up the challenge of the transparency of the system, but also that of the protection of the confidentiality of the collected data.
Digital watermarking and fee optimization on the agenda
Argus has a feature that allows for an innovative digital watermark, called proof of leakage, which allows for authentication of content to be protected, thus easily identifying reported pirated content and tracing its source. According to the researchers, these watermarks are resistant to various attacks:
“We assume that the watermark cannot be compromised without considerable degradation of the value of the content. Existing work has shown the success of watermarking robustness in some areas. For example, image watermarking can protect against attacks, such as splitting, sampling, filtering, image compression.”
From a technical standpoint, does the choice of Ethereum as a core infrastructure make sense given the high transaction costs? The researchers explain that the Argus team optimized several operations:
“(such that) the cost of reporting a hack is reduced to a cost equivalent to sending about 14 ETH transfer transactions to run on the public Ethereum network, which would otherwise correspond to thousands of transactions.”
Microsoft may have shut down its Azure blockchain services, but Argus demonstrates that the IT giant has not turned away from blockchain technology to solve real-world problems through a transparent, disintermediated system.
