Sony announced a blockchain system for managing digital content rights on Monday. The platform will track copyright ownership and creation timestamps for written works, music, films, and other media.
Sony announced a blockchain system for managing digital content rights on Monday. The platform will track copyright ownership and creation timestamps for written works, music, films, and other media.
Content creators and distributors face a gap between production tools and rights management. "Advances in technologies for digital content creation allow anyone to broadcast and share content, but the rights management of that content is still carried out conventionally by industry organizations or the creators themselves," Sony said in a statement. The company sees blockchain as a way to close that gap.
The system records when and by whom each piece of content was created. Because blockchain entries cannot be altered once written, the chain serves as a permanent record of ownership claims. Participants can use this record to verify rights generation and identify whether previous versions exist in the system.
Sony designed the platform for multiple types of media. Electronic textbooks, educational materials, music, films, VR experiences, and e-books all fit within the scope. The company suggested other fields might benefit from the same approach.
This effort builds on Sony's earlier blockchain work. Last year the company partnered with IBM to develop a blockchain product for education. A patent Sony filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in April 2018 describes similar capabilities. That application covers blockchain use for "various types of content or other data, such as movies, television, video, music, audio, games, scientific data, medical data, etc."
The patent outlines multiple ways to structure the system. One version assigns each user a dedicated blockchain. That ledger begins with a genesis block containing the user's identifying information. When the user gains rights to content, the system adds those rights to the chain.
Sony plans to expand blockchain use beyond rights management. The company is investigating how the technology could handle user authentication and support information management and data distribution across different business units.
