A use-case for block chain implementation

Unless you have been living in a cocoon, you would have heard of the controversy surrounding the music director Ilayaraja and the singer SPB. There was excessive social media outrage over the issue and both sides had vociferous and sane backers. While this controversy was raging, I was busy learning and researching blockchain development and this got me to think that the resolution of the royalty issue could be a potential use-case for my blockchain application development.

Royalty and licensing issue are quite common to almost all industries (not just the publishing industry but software/product industry as well). Piracy causes loss of revenue in many ways. My proposed solution to resolve this issue is

1. Every publisher/artists/author must publish his content along with a smart contract (containing the royalty logic) into the public Ethereum blockchain. The content being published will be signed with references to these smart contracts (maybe as a new ID3 tag, which can't be altered? or maybe a new container itself?).
2. Develop a new Dapp plugin which can be used by the streaming services to validate the ownership of a content using the signature written into the content file by calls to the Ethereum blockchain.
3. This validation will also result in the automatic execution of the smart contract and thereby pay out royalty charges instantly.
4.  Separate Dapp plugins will also need to be developed for every music player for the validations to be successful (release a new container/file format will solve this problem?).
5. All the pre-published content by the publishers can be fingerprinted, and various IoT devices can be used to query against this database, determine the owner and then appropriately implement the payout. Applications like ShaZam already do such acoustic fingerprinting. This paper also talks about an opensource acoustic fingerprinting library.

There are many facets to this proposal and few of them are quite complicated (building of a new container, acoustic fingerprinting of all pre-published items). So not all of them can be documented as part of my blog. So I will try few simple things now to demonstrate how smart contracts actually work.

• Firstly I will develop a smart contract that would capture the royalty logic of a particular content and then deploy this to the Ethereum TestNet.
• Then I shall a Dapp (distributed application) which will be hosted on a sample website which allows a user to play audio/video files. Every time a file is played from this website, the corresponding royalty will be paid out the owner.
• I shall attempt to generate the acoustic fingerprint and store them into a local database and then probably build a Raspberry Pi/Arduino based IoT device which would capture any played out audio and then perform validation/execution of the smart contract deployed on the Ethereum blockchain.

In the next blog, I shall commence work on a simple smart contract. Do provide me your feed back on this approach.

PS: After I wrote this blog, I googled to see if there are any other block chain based solutions for this and came across this wonderful article. The author has done excellent research in this area and has also suggested an approach. He has even decided not to patent the technology and release it completely opensource. I am pretty happy that my solution agrees with many of his recommendations. I would recommend those interested in this technology to look into his solution and get a better understanding of the same.

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