Microsoft Will Use The Ethereum Blockchain In Its Fight Against Piracy

The software giants new plan to combat piracy relies on the transparency of blockchain technology.

The Windows operating system and the Office productivity suite have always ranked first on software piracy platforms. So it's no surprise that Microsoft, the developer of both products, has worked hard to create anti-piracy measures. As stated in a new report published by Microsoft's research department with the collaboration of researchers from Alibaba and Carnegie Mellon University, Microsoft has been working on a blockchain-based incentive system to support its anti-piracy campaigns. As stated in the title of the research titled “Argus: A Completely Transparent Incentive System for Anti-Piracy Campaigns,” Microsoft's new system relies on the transparency aspect of the blockchain technology. Built on the Ethereum blockchain, Argus aims to provide an unreliable incentive mechanism while protecting data collected from the open anonymous population of hacker reporters.

Microsoft Will Use The Ethereum Blockchain In Its Fight Against Piracy

The report said, "We see this as a distributed system issue. In practice, we have overcome a number of unavoidable hurdles to ensure security despite full transparency." Argus enables pirated content to be traced back to the source with a corresponding watermarking algorithm detailed in the article. Also called "proof of leakage", every leaked content report includes an information-hiding procedure. That way, no one other than the informant can report the same watermarked copy without actually owning it. The system also has incentive-reducing measures to prevent any user from repeatedly reporting the same leaked content under different aliases. Detailing the issue of Ethereum network fees, the report explained that the team had optimized several cryptographic transactions “so that the cost for piracy reporting is reduced to an equivalent cost of sending about 14 ETH-transfer transactions to run on the public Ethereum network, which would otherwise correspond to thousands of transactions.”