Tech Mahindra has rolled out bCRMS, short for Blockchain-based Contract and Right Management System, designed to crack down on content piracy. The platform tackles a straightforward problem: creators
Tech Mahindra has rolled out bCRMS, short for Blockchain-based Contract and Right Management System, designed to crack down on content piracy. The platform tackles a straightforward problem: creators produce valuable work, criminals steal it, and then distribute it without permission or compensation.
In 2019, the US Chamber of Commerce calculated that online piracy costs the American economy $30 billion per year and wipes out as many as 560,000 jobs. The damage spreads across the entire industry—artists, studios, and advertisers all feel it.
Alistair Rennie, general manager at IBM Blockchain, put the problem this way: "Digital rights management is a pressing problem impacting artists, content creators, and advertisers worldwide, potentially costing the industry billions every year."
The old system relied on human moderators and automated detection. Moderators sifted through reports, verified authenticity, and handled disputes by hand. This consumed resources, and mistakes still slipped through—requiring more labor to fix the damage afterward.
bCRMS replaces that setup. Smart contracts on the blockchain detect breaches and manage royalties on their own. The system monitors whether content has the right licenses and approval, and it executes this check in real-time. Automation cuts down the human overhead and the errors that plague traditional systems.
Tech Mahindra engineer Rajesh Dhuddu described the move this way: "As part of our TechMNxt charter, bCRMS is developed to usher in the next generation of digital rights management systems for the media and entertainment industry."
Creators get more from this than automated enforcement. They can track their royalty payments as they come in, monitor revenue streams, and see where their work shows up. Tech Mahindra built the platform to scale, making it accessible to independent musicians, small film producers, and emerging artists who couldn't afford the manual approach.
Previous experiments with blockchain in entertainment took different routes—decentralized storage for music and video, like BeatzCoin. This new approach targets the royalty and rights problem that has plagued the industry for years.
