Media tracking platform to tackle online piracy

Innovation Tagline: Media tracking platform to tackle online piracy

Project Keywords: Copyright content, copyright violation, database of copyrighted content, web crawler, Hyperledger Fabric

Project Members

Swapneel Khandagale noblesse@noblesseinfosec.com
Ramaguru Radhakrishnan r_ramaguru@cb.amrita.edu

Project Description (no more than 1,000 words including graphics)

Copyright infringement is a big issue in today's world, where intellectual property is often worth more than a physical one. When a piracy website distributes media that is copyrighted by some other entity, it makes the entity lose money and as a result even governments lose their share of taxes. And since such infringement leads to less purchases of the copyrighted content through legal means, it also lowers the income in industries that produce such content.

Since encryptions and device restrictions are often not enough to limit piracy, another way to limit it would be targeting the websites that distribute copyright content illegally. Our system is a distributed database of information of copyright content provided by the legal owner of such content that can be accessed by our crawler as a sample to identify content similar to it on unauthorised websites. The crawler indexes the URL and IP address of the platform hosting the content illegally and notifies the concerned owner of the content. Who verify whether the content belongs to them. If it is verified that the content does belong to them, the illegal distributor or the content is taken down from the internet.

Problem

Copyright infringement is a big issue in today's world, where intellectual property is often worth more than a physical one. When a piracy website distributes media that is copyrighted by some other entity, it makes the entity lose money and as a result even governments lose their share of taxes. And since such infringement leads to less purchases of the copyrighted content through legal means, it also lowers the income in industries that produce such content.

Encryptions like DRM and device restrictions are often not enough to limit piracy. The number of content that actually gets leaked is not small. It includes theatre recordings, content got by circumventing DRM on DVDs and Blu-rays, streaming recordings and leaks of original copies as well. Since the leak of such content is inevitable, might as well focus on removing it from illegal platforms as soon as possible.

Solution

Our solution is a combination of web crawlers, deep web crawlers and a distributed database system on blockchain setup using Hyperledger Fabric. The database contributors are mainly the owners of the copyright content. They can contribute a database node to our blockchain if they need to and can remove it from the blockchain as well, according to their necessity.

The crawler searches the internet for any content or link that appears similar to the content whose information has been provided on the blockchain, indexes it and our system sends out a notification to the copyright content owner, who then verifies it and approves forwarding of the crawled information to law enforcement or any other agency responsible for taking the content down.

Existing solutions utilise crawlers just like our system. The key difference between their system and ours is that they don't involve anyone else in the process, other than the copyright owner. In our case, the content owner can be a part of the blockchain system and contribute towards it. Law enforcement agencies and other agencies that can contribute by facilitating removal of the content can also be part of our blockchain system.

Another difference is that the existing service providers crawl the web only for a particular content that they have been tasked to find on contract basis. Our system lets the stakeholders manage their own database of content that they don't want to be infringed.

During the prototype phase, a web crawler and a basic distributed blockchain database can be setup with the facility to search for content that the crawler has found and suspects of being infringed.

Schematic diagram of the system

Accomplishment and Team

Swapneel Khandagale - A graduate student of Cyber Security at Amrita School of Engineering Coimbatore, India. A finalist at Global CyberPeace Challenge 2021 organised by Cyberpeace Foundation, a quarter finalist at Samvedan IoT Challenge 2021 organised by IIT Chennai and National Semifinalist at Microsoft Imagine Cup 2022.

Asst Prof Ramaguru Radhakrishnan - Assistant Professor at Amrita School of Engineering Coimbatore, India with 7 years of industry and 3 years of research experience. Founder of நம்Chain® Open Initiative Research Lab. Winner of Cameron Best Outgoing Student Award by Cameron & Kumaraguru College of Technology, Winner of Bosch Global Ideation Competition - InnoTrip (Sharing Theme) by Robert Bosch GmBH, Young Researcher Award 2020 by Institute of Scholars (InSc), Honorary Doctorate in Social Works by World Human Rights Protection Commission (WHRPC)

Project Plan

Q1 2022

Identify a problem and design a potential solution

Q2 2022

Minimum Viable Product: The developed platform has minimum relevant features to simulate the concept

Evaluation: Platform is ready for stakeholder testing

Q3 2022

Platform is ready for early adopters

Q4 2022

UI and performance optimisation for better ease of use and results