Sony Turns To Blockchain For Digital Rights Data Storage

Technology behemoth Sony is reportedly planning to venture into the use of blockchain technology to secure its digital rights data according to a recently published patent application.

The company’s plans were revealed in a recent publication of a patent application in which the company points out numerous reasons why current digital rights management (DRM) solutions are unreliable. Some of those reasons include the fact that users lose all the content they have acquired when the business model of the rights provider fails or if the rights provider goes out of business. Another reason is that they often rely on a single point of failure especially when dealing with systems or solutions that target interoperability.

Blockchain is one of the technologies that are best positioned to provide better solutions. It will allow companies like Sony to implement solutions that will require user identification to facilitate access to access content that they have already purchased. DRM systems are solutions or technologies that have been designed to allow access to copyrighted content only to those that have purchased the rights to access that content. Sony used a cloud-based digital rights locker called UltraViolet as an example in its patent filing.

The Japanese tech giant filed the patent in partnership with its Sony Pictures Entertainment which is also one of Sony’s subsidiaries. The patent mentions films as some of the content that could benefit from the blockchain solution. The company, however, claims that a system based on decentralized ledger technology can be used to manage digital rights for a variety of content including music, TV shows, games, medical data and other forms of digital content.

The patent reportedly cites several ways in which blockchain technology can be implemented in digital rights management. One of the suggested methods involves coding the rights of each individual user in a dedicated blockchain. The ledger starts off with a genesis block which contains information about the user. Once a user acquires the rights to a specific content, for example, a movie download, then the blockchain will register that the user has rights to that movie.

A DRM computer system would also be ideal especially when verifying rights within a decentralized ledger and also encrypting the content for easy access when needed. Sony claims that such a system can be implemented in a variety of ways and one of them involves having a DRM agent on user devices. It is currently not clear which path Sony will take as far as its blockchain solution is concerned.