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We all know how the music and movie industries have been moaning that nasty customers keep copying their products without permission.
And note that I say "customers" because quite a few studies have shown that people who "pirate" copyrighted recordings are also likely to have a larger than average collection of store-bought legitimate stuff and hence are these industries best customers.
Never the less, these industries don't seem to be happy unless they're able to put on huge public displays of unhappiness at the quintillions of dollars they're loosing to spotty-faced geeks who "steal" their wares.
In the digital age, copying movies or music has never been easier so the industries involved have come up with all manner of "clever" ways of stopping us from backing up our CDs, DVDs, BluRays and other forms of media.
Digital Rights Management (DRM) is the order of the day... and now they're planning to ramp it up a bit.
According to at least one report, Sony is creating a "next gen DRM" using blockchain.
Yes, it seems that they want to give us "crypto-crap rap" or maybe "bitcoin box office".
Right now it's not targeted at anything other than its STEM focused Global Education arm so you won't have to worry about it appearing as part of your next download or music/movie purchase... but stay tuned for that!
In fact, Sony's blockchain doesn't appear to be as much of a DRM system (sorry Engadget) as it is simply a way of tracking the promulgation of transcripts and data.
However, this does raise the prospect of blockchain being used as a disincentive for would-be pirates. If every copy of a creative work was to carry the entire chain of distribution within it, the job of tracking down and "dealing to" those who would unlawfully copy movies, music, books etc, would become a whole lot easier.
What's more, if a mate copies your copy of something then if/when he gets caught, you'll also be implicated because your copy will also be in the blockchain.
The reality however, is that like most other forms of DRM, this simply won't work in the real world.
The first thing that someone with a blockchain-protected digital work will do is extract the content from its wrapper. This extraction has to be done as part of the normal playback/reading operation so it will be possible -- even if it means hooking the video output of a legit device to a video recording device.
The fact that some people are prepared to download and watch "screeners" of box-office movies is proof that those wanting free stuff are often happy to settle for "less than perfect" quality -- so old school ripping will be just fine for them.
And once again, as we saw when one of the special pre-release copies of the movie Gravity was ripped and uploaded... it only takes a single "good", unencumbered copy of a work to surface and the horse has bolted, so to speak.
So yes... blockchain sounds like a great way to monitor and track the distribution of material -- but it seems like a crappy way to try and protect it from copying.
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