Abstract
The difficulty in protecting and enforcing Intellectual Property (IP) rights has been a major obstacle to sharing intellectual works in digital forms. In this work, we present a prototype design for a decentralized e-learning market-place where teachers, authorized publishers and authors can publish their learning materials, establish conditions for allowing access, and grant or revoke access based on adherence or infringement of their rights. Using the Blockchain of Learning Logs (BOLL) and a digital book reader (BookRoll), we demonstrate how authors can be empowered to deploy smart contracts that protect and enforce these rights on their intellectual works in a distributed manner. We particularly use the blockchain in order to enable trust, trace-ability, rights protection, transparency and collaboration between authors and users of their work with no third party interference. Finally, we examine the implications of our proposed design, its limitations and directions for future work.
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Acknowledgement
This work was partly supported by JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (S)16H06304 and NEDO Special Innovation Program on AI and Big Data 18102059-0.
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Ocheja, P., Flanagan, B., Ogata, H. (2020). Decentralized E-Learning Marketplace: Managing Authorship and Tracking Access to Learning Materials Using Blockchain. In: Shen, J., Chang, YC., Su, YS., Ogata, H. (eds) Cognitive Cities. IC3 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1227. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6113-9_59
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6113-9_59
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