Blockchain for digital rights management

Online digital content service becomes more and more easily, however, free consumption and excessive spreading without rights protection will hurt the content providers' benefits and causes business loss, another problem is once the content provider supply illegal or politically sensitive content such as terroristic opinion or multimedia content, it will cause serious social problem such as fright or social crisis. To solve this problem, in this paper we proposed a blockchain-based scheme for digital rights management(named DRMChain), which supports the right content serves the right users in a right way, the DRMChain can provide trusted and high-level credible content protection and conditional traceability of violation content service. In the proposed DRMChain, we use two isolated blockchain application interfaces (BAI) to respectively store plain and cipher summary information of original and DRM-protected digital content, and considering large capacity of digital content such as image, audio or video, we proposed external flexible storage of plain/cipher digital content and creates hashID of the content itself and links with the blockchain. In DRMChain scheme, we named the BAI plain interface as BAIP for summary metadata storage of original content, and the BAI cipher interface as BAIC for DRM-protected content service. In the DRMChain scheme we proposed efficient and secure authentication, privacy protection and multi-signature-based conditional traceability approaches, and thus the DRM license, usage control and constrain information can be easily retrieved form the blockchain, and customs can query all the consumption transaction lists of free or paid consumption history to prevent baleful fee-deduction. Analysis and performance evaluation manifest the DRMChain scheme provides a reliable, secure, efficient and tamper-resistance digital content service and DRM practice.