A Blockchain-Based Copyright Protection Scheme With Proactive Defense

Copyright protection, including copyright registration, copyright transfer and infringement penalty, plays a critical role in preventing illegal usage of original works. The mainstream traditional copyright protection schemes need an authority online all the time to handle copyright issues and face some problems such as intricate copyright transfer, single point of failure and so on. To alleviate the burden of the authority, a few blockchain-based copyright protection schemes are proposed. However, most of them do not consider copyright transfer, and their infringement penalty may only happen after copyright owners discover the infringement behavior (i.e., “ex-post penalty”). In this article, we propose a new security strategy, called “Proactive Defense” in copyright protection which can prevent infringement before it occurs. With our proposed proactive defense strategy, we design a secure copyright protection scheme which provides advantages of compact copyright transfer and prior infringement penalty. More concrete, both copyright registration and transfer are regarded as transactions and recorded to the blockchain. Based on the double-authentication-prevention signature and non-interactive zero-knowledge proof techniques, illegal copyright transfer can be detected and the infringement penalty can be done automatically with a tailored smart contract before the completion of the transfer. Our security analysis shows that the proposed scheme can achieve all desirable security properties. Moreover, we implement our scheme in Java and evaluate the performance experimentally. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme has good security and efficiency, which can be applied for the copyright protection.