How we use blockchain for Media DRM (Digital Rights Management)

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In an ideal world, it would be possible to place agents in all pirate networks, that would then act to detect and identify pirated material.

This would mean rapid detection wherever piracy occurs. Unfortunately, it isn’t practical to infiltrate these networks for any single player – the scope is just too large.

But what if everyone could be a piracy detection agent? What if it were possible to turn every single pirate in every network into a potential informer?

This is what Screener Copy by Custos does.

Custos uses blockchain technology to create a decentralised network of global agents that detect and identify pirated material.

Say you are a filmmaker, and you have just finished editing your final copy of a movie. You want to drive up the hype so you want to get it in front of some reviewers.

You go on screenercopy.com, upload your movie, and input the emails addresses of some reviewers that you know.

On the back end, the platform generates unique copies for each reviewer. In each copy, using cutting edge forensic watermarking, we embed a Bitcoin wallet.

(A Bitcoin wallet is just a special string of numbers.)

This number is not visible to a viewer, but encoded into small variations in the colour and brightness that a human eye won’t be able to see, but that will remain in the copy even if you copy or compress it.

Those variations, and the unique number – i.e. Bitcoin wallet – contained within them, are what make up our forensic watermark.

In each Bitcoin wallet there’s a bit of Bitcoin. Any one in the world that finds a copy in the wild can take this Bitcoin as their reward, and through the blockchain we are informed whose copy was found somewhere it should not have been.

Wait, what is screenercopy.com?

Screener Copy is Custos’s SaaS (software-as-a-service) product for independent film producers and media distributors.

A Screener Copy user can simply upload content, get it watermarked with our blockchain-based tracking system, and nominate a list of recipients to receive unique links to view the video. 

In a larger-scale example, a Tokyo-based client of ours uses a custom-branded, white-labeled SaaS product we built for secure distribution of movie screeners to a network of buyers across Japan.

If you’re interested in getting your own custom-branded secure content distribution platform built by our team, get in touch today.

There are a lot of exciting developments happening in the Blockchain for media space.

Ujo Team for example, is tackling royalty payments in the media industry with big customers like Imogen Heap and RAC already onboard. PopChest is making a blockchain-based YouTube competitor which makes it easier for creatives to monetise their content. ascribe tracks ownership of digtal artworks on a blockchain. And SingularDTV is trying to replace the old film studio model with a tokenised economy.

It’s an exciting new world, and Custos is positioned to become the protection layer for all of these digital assets and the distribution platforms helping drive sustainable, piracy-free profitability in creative industries especially. 🤞