Sony Unveils a Blockchain-based Digital Rights Management System

Japanese tech giant Sony unveiled a new blockchain-based software for digital rights managements. The software controls and deals with intellectual property rights to overcome the authentication issues in the field. In the official press release on Monday, October 15th, the tech giant noted that this project is a joint venture between Sony Global Education and Sony Music Entertainment Japan.

Copyright infringements is one of the major issues that content creators across the globe are facing today. Moreover, all the content rights management done today is largely manual, done either by the individual creators or the organizations owning the content. Sony says that its new blockchain-based software can do this entire process more efficiently.

In the press release, Sony explains: “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.”

Sony also said that it plans to broaden its application target by including other type of content like e-book, video, music, virtual-reality, and other content formats. The tech giant said that it is considering to commercialize this system going further.

Sony said that blockchain can play a crucial role in solving the data infringement issue because it is absolutely transparent and tamper-proof. Sony’d DLT software can share and verify the exact date the content was created by a particular author.

However, the exact way of working of Sony’s DLT software remains unclear. The company has given a general outlook calling the technology as a way to “record verifiable information in a difficult to falsify way.” Sony also added that the “Sony Group is also considering innovative ways to make use of blockchain technology for information management and data distribution in a host of different fields.”

This is not for the first time that Sony is demonstrating the blockchain use for the data rights management. Earlier this year in April 2018, a report suggested that Sony has already begun work in this direction.

In August 2018, the Japanese tech behemoth published two patents in the blockchain space. The first talked about an electronic hardware device to develop and maintain a blockchain on several electronic nodes, wherein multiple blocks are connected with at least one of the existing blocks.

The other patent talked of maintaining a blockchain using multiple virtual nodes while developing a mechanism of accessing the blockchain using any one of these nodes.