Sony Creates Blockchain-Based Right Management System For Digital Content
Sony Corporation had revealed the introduction of a blockchain-based digital rights management system.
The company announced in a statement on its website that the new framework is developed on an earlier system for verifying, sharing and managing rights to educational data previously built by Sony and Sony Global Education.
It was reported in April that Sony filed an application for a patent to store user’s digital rights on the blockchain. Sony cautioned in its patent application that “conventional solutions may not be very reliable and rely on one unique point of failure which could lead to the loss of all the acquired content.”
Being able to see the issues blockchain technology is capable of handling, Sony went ahead to work on its plan to create a suitable system for digital content using blockchain technology. With this regards, the company filed an application for a patent to store users’ digital rights data on the blockchain on April 26, 2018.
A piece from the statement states:
“Today, advances in technologies for digital content creation allow anyone to broadcast and share content, 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.”
In addition to the functionality on which the previous management system is based, this system also offers digital rights management for different new types of content as well as electronic textbooks and other educational content, music, films, audio, games, scientific data, medical data, VR content, and e-books.
In the statement Sony noted:
“[It is] specialized for managing rights-related information of written works, with features for demonstrating the date and time that electronic data was created, leveraging the properties of blockchains to record verifiable information in a difficult to falsify way, and identifying previously recorded works, allowing participants to share and verify when a piece of electronic data was created and by whom.”
With this, Sony expects to be a leader in the adoption of blockchain technology in the educational field through Sony Global Education and in data distribution and management through Sony Group. The company also plans to test likely commercial avenues by using the blockchain’s technologies and commercial development.
