MeRiT : Media Tracking Platform to Tackle Online Piracy

Owned by Swapneel Khandagale
Last updated: May 21, 2022
4 min read

Innovation Tagline:  Distributed Ledger Powered Intelligent Crawler based Media Tracker for Copyright Infringement

Project Keywords:  #hyperledger-fabric, #web-crawler, #dark-web-crawler, #piracy, #digital-rights-management

Project Members

  1. Swapneel Khandagale, M.Tech - 1st Year, TIFAC-CORE in Cyber Security, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham - noblesse@noblesseinfosec.com
  2. Ramaguru Radhakrishnan, Assistant Professor, TIFAC-CORE in Cyber Security, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham - r_ramaguru@cb.amrita.edu


Prototype Outcomes

Pitch Deck

MeRiT_Hyperledger_Challenge_2022_AVV_Cyber.pptx


Project repository link:

https://github.com/Amrita-TIFAC-Cyber-Blockchain/MeRiT


Demo Video

dummyfile.txt



Solution

Project Description

A Distributed Ledger System maintaining and monitoring the information on the copyrighted content provided by the legal owners. Such copyrighted content that could be accessed by our crawler to identify same or similar content on unauthorized websites. The crawler will index the URL and IP address of the platform hosting the content illegally. The system notifies the concerned owner of the copyright infringment, who verifies whether the content belongs to them.

Describe the solution

Our solution combines web crawlers, deep web crawlers, a distributed ledger technology and machine learning to address the issue on media piracy. The ledger contributors are mainly the owners of the copyrighted content. According to their necessity, they can contribute a node to our blockchain and withdraw the node from the blockchain network.

The crawler searches the internet for any similar content or link to the content whose information has been immutably stored on the blockchain. If found, the information is indexed to our system. It sends out a notification to the copyright content owner, who then verifies it and approves forwarding the crawled information to law enforcement or any other agency responsible for taking down the content.

Existing solutions utilize crawlers just like our system. The novel approach we have taken is the employment of distributed ledger, which remove intermediaries, i.e., the system does not 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 to it. Law enforcement agencies and other agencies that can contribute by facilitating content removal are also part of our blockchain ecosystem.

Another key difference is that the existing service providers crawl the web only for the content they have been tasked to find on a contract basis. Our system lets the stakeholders manage the content database that they do not want to be infringed.

During the prototype phase, a web crawler and a distributed blockchain ledger based on Hyperledger Fabric can be set up with the facility to search for content that the crawler has found and suspects of being infringed.

Why is your solution better than existing/ state-of-the-art solutions?

  • Most of the existing state-of-art solutions in handling piracy or digital rights related to copyright does not employ crawlers for gathering the intelligence.
  • Majority of them today are not considering Dark Web.
  • Handful solutions are using Blockchain as their underlying database for digital-rights management, but this approach has just started.

Our solution combines

  • Crawler for intelligence
  • Blockchain for immutability, Traceability, Transparency of the data
  • Machine Learning to automatically detect and prevent piracy

Does your solution have any Environmental, Social or Governance impact?

Yes, our solution would have social and Governance Impact.

  • Social and Economical: Because today most of us generate enormous amount of data like pictures, videos, social media posts which is subject to intellectual property rights. The present day social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram and Facebook are generating new Business and Economic model. Our system would help in identifying media piracy which would impact all these social media content creators economically.
  • Governance: The solution enables copyright owners to keep track of their copyright violations on their own. This reduces considerably the time required by legal agencies to investigate the reported infringement. In the long run, the widespread use of this solution can make Intellectual Property Rights violation investigations faster and more efficient.

Did you socialise your project or interact with anyone in the community? What notes did they give? Please tag them.

No. We have not discussed this with any of the Hyperledger Community members. We would like to do after Prototype Evaluation.


Project Plan

Q2/2022

  • Implementation of Web Crawler (Surface and Dark Web)
  • Setting up the Hyperledger Fabric Network Locally 
  • Implementation of Bloom Filter
  • Implementation of Chaincode
  • Implementation of AWS - Rekognition 
  • Prototype Submission

Q3/2022

  • Hosting the Project on the Cloud Platform 
  • Adoption to Legal compliance like GPDR
  • Improvements to Chaincode based on Copyright Laws

Q4/2022

  • Testing of the Project
  • Launch the Service to Public Use


Open Source Community Engagement

The project is already available as a Hyperledger Lab at the link provided below:

https://labs.hyperledger.org/labs/media-tracking-platform-to-tackle-online-piracy.html

And the same would be utilised for contributions from the open source community.


How will the project be sustained? What are the skills that need to be hired?

  • MeRiT will sustain because of the sheer need of Copyright management support to individuals without need to involve third-party and low-fee service

  • MeRiT could be integrate to existing social media platform for automatic identification of infriged contents

  • Skills Required:

    • Blockchain Developer
    • Full Stack Developer
    • Mobile Application Developer
    • Machine Learning Engineer
    • Digital Rights Management / Intellectual Property Rights Advocate

How do you plan industry adoption?

  • MeRiT services shall be offered under different tiers
    • Free
    • Premium - Silver
    • Premium - Gold
    • Premium - Platinum
  • MeRiT would let users integrate their custom ledger to our system for secure tracking
  • MeRiT could be integrated to existing social media platform for automatic identification of infringed contents.