Vietnam-based Copyrobo unveils blockchain-based copyright management service

“Blockchain” by deavmi. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

As the official website of the U.S. Copyright Office notes, copyright protection for an original work of authorship subsists from the time that the work is created in fixed form. That is, once the work is created, U.S. copyright law considers the author of that work to hold copyright protection over the work, with or without copyright registration.

However, the growth of digital forms of media has created a problem for copyright owners as it has become very simple for copyright protections to be infringed upon through content sharing. Consider the recent copyright infringement action filed against Donald Trump for his presidential campaign’s use of a copyright-protected picture on Twitter, allowing thousands of individuals to continue the copyright infringement by retweeting the original post. There are a multitude of publication services available through the Internet which greatly increases the ease of committing such infringement.

A tech company situated in Vietnam is hoping to offer a service which helps copyright owners manage their copyright-protected property more effectively. A recent press release from Copyrobo announced a web- and app-based service which can provide timestamped evidence of documents, video and music. The release states that Copyrobo “produces qualified timestamps that provide evidence with the highest probative value,” noting that the timestamps comply with European Union regulations on electronic identification and trust services for electronic transactions.

Copyrobo’s service is powered by its CopyrightKey technology, which creates a unique identifier to provide evidence that a particular work has been copyrighted. Copyrobo says that the service is integrated with a variety of popular social media sites, including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, as well as cloud storage applications like Google Drive, which would seem to give the copyright management service a leg up when trying to prevent infringement occurring through those digital pathways.

Part of the underlying technology behind Copyrobo’s CopyrightKey service relies upon blockchain, the decentralized distributed ledger system which has made some early forays into the financial industry in the form of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Blockchain ledgers are distributed across multiple nodes and each node is updated with a new copy of the ledger each time a new transaction is recorded on the ledger. This distributed nature makes the ledger highly immutable, or more difficult to change over the course of time, as new transaction blocks are added to the blockchain. This leads to transactions which can be highly verifiable and reduce the chances that a malicious actor could alter the ledger for deceitful purposes.

As this copyright management blockchain system indicates, the applications for blockchain extend well beyond the financial industry. This May, Business Insider’s coverage of a client note distributed by banking giant Goldman Sachs identified many uses for blockchain in building smarter electrical grids, improving trust in online identities and reducing the administrative costs created by filing paperwork.

Slowly but surely, blockchain is being identified by a variety of corporations as a technology which could positively impact business operations. This October, we covered recent news of a patent application filed by Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) and published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office disclosing a technology which would increase privacy for parties conducting foreign exchange transactions. In early November, reports indicated that Internet retail company Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK) made a seed investment in SettleMint, a tech startup which has developed a blockchain system for corporate shareholder voting. Recent media reports indicate that American tech giant Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) has partnered with travel booking website Webjet to develop a blockchain-based system for hotel bookings which addresses issues of data mismatches leading to booking errors.

Cases of copyright infringement occurring online continue to grow at a pace which should be very troubling to copyright owners. In September 2013, Variety reported on a study financed by NBC Universal which found that copyright-infringing bandwidth use increased by 159.3 percent between 2010 and 2012. The study focused on three global regions, North America, Asia and Europe, and found that nearly a quarter of all bandwidth use consisted of such infringing bandwidth. The Google Transparency Report, an online dashboard providing information on requests sent to Google to remove copyright-infringing data from search results, indicates that 1.91 billion links have been removed from Google pursuant to such requests. Google’s data also shows that requests to remove copyright-infringing links have grown from a couple million in January 2013 up past 20 million by the end of 2016.