BlockGuard: Advancing digital copyright integrity with blockchain technique

Abstract

In the swiftly advancing media sector, piracy remains a significant challenge, eroding consumer willingness to pay, undermining rightful economic gains for copyright holders, and diluting creative incentives for content creators. Existing copyright protection mechanisms are inadequate for robust intellectual property safeguarding within complex digital environments, especially lacking in lifecycle tracking, authenticity verification, and dispute resolution. This paper introduces BlockGuard, a pioneering blockchain-based credible digital copyright management system designed to mitigate these issues through strategic use of blockchain and digital watermarking techniques. Furthermore, it enhances issue resolution via the application of Non-Fungible Token (NFT) contracts. BlockGuard aims to achieve three primary objectives. Firstly, it enables comprehensive lifecycle tracking of digital assets, ensuring visibility from content creation to its diverse applications. Secondly, by employing digital watermarking, it provides stringent authenticity verification to drastically reduce copyright infringements. Lastly, leveraging blockchain’s immutability and transparency, it streamlines dispute resolution processes. BlockGuard presents an efficient, secure, and transparent approach for managing digital copyrights in today’s media landscape. It showcases a detailed protection center and public appraisal workflow, and verifies the effectiveness of three originality detection processes. In terms of performance, BlockGuard requires 88% of the storage space on secondary storage compared to conventional solutions (that store only the original image) and incurs minimal storage overhead at the kilobyte level on blockchain storage. Furthermore, its most resource-intensive operation consumes no more than 200,000 gas, with other operations requiring no more than 100,000 gas, equivalent to a standard Ethereum transaction.