Abstract

Conventional copyright systems are governed nationally, and there is no global ledger to store copyright data. Because copyright laws differ across countries, it is difficult to provide cross-border copyright protection. The differences in national copyright laws, absence of a global copyright monitoring system with a central cloud that can store copyrighted content worldwide, and lack of transparency raise challenges in international copyright management. Copyright information is dispersed across various centralized databases, which are not incentivized to share. It is impossible to bring all centralized servers that store billions of copyright data under a synchronized platform. Due to the lack of a global copyright monitoring system through which people can investigate whether a work is copyrighted by searching copyright catalogs and records, copyrighted works are often downloaded from Google or social media unconsciously and shared with others freely, which may result in huge revenue losses to copyright holders. In this paper, we propose a novel decentralized copyright system based on consortium blockchain, which ensures cross-border copyright protection of individuals' digital content and solves existing challenges in international copyright management. The proposed system enables a synchronized platform to register and trade copyright globally without using a global cloud. Unlike conventional copyright systems, the proposed system does not require any centralized server to store copyrighted content. Instead, blockchain is used to store the metadata of copyrighted content. Individual countries receive membership from a copyright federation and participate in block creation by executing the energy-saving proof-of-authority consensus algorithm. These countries are regarded as the authorities of the platform and are responsible for proposing new blocks after validating transactions. Anyone, either registered or unregistered, can investigate a copyrighted work, but only registered users can make transactions. A token-based payment system is also proposed for paying copyright charges or transaction fees to the authorities through the federation. A prototype of the system was implemented, and its performance was evaluated. This paper provides direction and guidance towards international copyright management.