Blockchain technology is considered to be an ideal tool for digital rights management. Sony has developed a new system to protect authors’ rights.
The issue of authors’ right protection is a pressing one in the modern world and it is obvious that this ‘modern’ problem requires a modern solution. Japanese electronics giant Sony has proposed a new blockchain-based digital rights management system that is expected to be released on a commercial basis.
Currently, content rights management procedures are quite often conducted manually by some organizations or creators of the content, nevertheless, such approaches have turned out to be not very efficient. So, the new system offered by Sony is here to facilitate and streamline all these processes.
Though today, owing to a number of achievements in technological development, there are wide opportunities for digital content creation and sharing with others. Commenting this thesis, the company states:
“But the rights management of that content is still carried out conventionally by industry organizations or the creators themselves, necessitating a more efficient way of managing and demonstrating ownership of copyright-related information for written works.”
New Digital Rights Management System
As it is written in a recently published press release, Sony Corporation, Sony Music Entertainment Inc., and Sony Global Education developed a rights management system for digital content that uses the capacities of blockchain technology.
The new development will be used to manage copyright-related information for content in the digital world. The creators of the system have paid special attention to educational content that could be found on the global net.
According to the information provided by the company, this system has been created on the base of the existing system for sharing and rights management of educational data that was presented by Sony last year. This first solution is aimed at helping school administrators to consolidate and manage students’ educational data from a number of schools and academic institutions with a view to increase the level of efficiency of education system.
With the help of the platform, users will have a possibility to exchange and check information about the content including exact time and date of its creation, as well as some professional and personal details about its author.
The system will be used not only for examining the information about works and their authors, it will also automatically verify the rights generation of written content.
Nevertheless, it’s worth mentioning that the system is not limited to written works only, it is intended to deal with the rights management of different types of digital content. This list includes electronic textbooks as well as other educational content, music, films, VR content, and e-books.
Other Blockchain-related Activities by Sony
The described system is not the first step made by Sony in the blockchain sphere. For example, Sony Global Education is continuously working on elaborating and prototyping towards the application of blockchain technology in the educational sphere.
Moreover, Sony Group itself is currently examining possibilities to utilize the potential of blockchain technology in the area of information management and data distribution in various different fields.
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