A South African start up has come up with a new way to use Bitcoin and its blockchain technology to provide media owners with a means to keep recipients from redistributing copyrighted content. How it works Custos Media Technologies ’ “ tracking technology ” enables copies of uploaded media to have imperceptible watermarks that go with a bounty – a Bitcoin private key – which can be claimed by anyone who uses a free tool. The bounty can be claimed anonymously from anywhere but once. It will appear on the blockchain within seconds of being claimed. When that happens, it will alert the client – the legitimate owner of the content. Since the technology is designed to make Custos’ core IP identify the “original infringer” of the pirated content – the user who first rips a movie and uploads it, or shares their copy of an e-book on-line, the alert will help determine if the content is being accessed by an unauthorized user. The detection, the company says, it enables media owners to “audit” the media recipients, honour their licenses, and do not distribute the content. Since media recipients know that they can be traced, it provides a very strong disincentive to leak content in the first place. The company’s spokesperson says in an email: “However, the rapid detection is also valuable to our clients. For example, if a movie owner knows soon enough that a pirate copy of a pre-release screener is already being circulated (but perhaps not visible on the public internet yet), they can take mitigating steps to minimise revenue losses, for example by moving an official release date ahead to avoid the situation where the only publicly available copy of a movie is the pirated one. Our system does play nicely with traditional DRM, though […]
