To tackle the spread of piracy, Microsoft has come up with a new blockchain-based solution called Argus.
Argus is an Ethereum based fully transparent program, which incentivizes the anonymous reporters of piracy with bounties. Microsoft hopefully thinks of implementing this technology and bring more piracy efforts down.
A New Blockchain-Based Solution
Tackling online piracy is a real hassle for copyright holders. They grow in a multitude of ways and rapidly over time. While there are several ways copyright companies are trying this bring them down, it’s still hard for them to focus on everything.
Thus, here’s a solution Microsoft has come up with – Argus – An Ethereum based system that is transparent, effective, and rewards the piracy reports. This new anti-piracy campaign could be more effective since it verifies every report with several checks and is better than any other system now.
For identifying the source of spread, it uses a unique watermark that corresponds with a secret code. This lets the trackers mark the source as “accused” when it’s duplicated. While these technicalities are difficult to understand, put simply, Argus is a transparent system to prevent piracy.
It lets people report piracy anonymously and takeaway bounties on successful flagging. The program has inputs from researchers at Alibaba and Carnegie Mellon University. Theoretically, Argus works on various media types like images, audio, and software.
While it’s unclear how effective the system will be, researchers claim the technology is better than old-fashioned piracy reporting campaigns since it’s transparent.
While it’s interesting, a South African company called Custos came up with a similar idea years ago, but Microsoft claims Argus is better than it.
Microsoft is all set to present the research of the Argus system at 40th International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems, held virtually next month.
