Content anti-piracy management system and method

#Over the past five years content piracy has dramatically disrupted the media industry on a global scale and the decentralized nature is increasingly becoming more complex and difficult to manage and monitor. The distribution of infringed material on content sharing platforms such as Facebook and YouTube have grown rapidly. For example, viewers can easily find links to live sporting events, hosted on someone's Facebook account, find the newest episodes of their favorite series on YouTube or Dailymotion or even join groups like ‘mobile movies’ on Telegram (messaging app) and/or download compressed video files of the newest Hollywood blockbusters onto their phones and cast to their Smart TVs.

#As the video sharing community expands and more and more content is shared online, monitoring and managing content sharing to prevent piracy is expected to become a difficult undertaking as re-transmission technologies evolve and other services like Snap Chat, Periscope, WhatsApp, Youku, etc. become significant distribution platforms with millions of followers globally and used by thousands of pirates to re-broadcast copyrighted material. In addition, millennials and the next generation are breaking apart from the traditional bundle service system and are opting in for cheaper or free alternative services; their value-system of content consumption is different than the previous generations.

#While anti-piracy organizations and vendors are equipped with the appropriate technologies to take down copyright infringed materials, the overall process faces several limitations. For example, in the absence of watermarking, content owners must continually search for potential unauthorized use of their content, which is inefficient and generally by the time the content is removed it has already been seen by millions of viewers globally. On the other hand, current watermarking/fingerprinting technologies are difficult to implement and generally requires the use of extensive computing resources. Further, current watermarking/fingerprinting technologies (e.g., YouTube's content ID system) are platform specific and are not available and/or adaptable across platforms, thus severely limiting their applicability and usability. Existing technologies also suffer from a lack of standardization, further exasperating the problem of cross-platform usability. Further, existing technologies require the content to first be uploaded to a platform before it can be watermarked/fingerprinted. This consumes significant resources including time and money, and is overall unwieldy. Moreover, content owners typically need to hire attorneys to properly register the content and/or send cease and desist letters on their behalf, which is costly.

#FIG. 1A is a block diagram showing some of the components typically incorporated in at least some of the computer systems and other devices on which the facility operates.

#FIG. 1B illustrates an example of a communications environment in which some embodiments of the facility can be utilized.

#FIG. 2A is a flow diagram showing a process performed by the facility in some embodiments when receiving new content for uploading.

#As outlined above, traditional anti-piracy technologies to the fast-changing and growing decentralized content sharing industry are becoming archaic in containing content piracy. With many different anti-piracy methods, a reformulation is needed that minimizes divergent approaches and unifies participants on a common protocol.

#Accordingly, the inventors have conceived and reduced to practice a software and/or hardware facility that can be used by content owners to assert ownership of content so that copyright friendly websites and services can take action against copyright piracy effectively, efficiently and is scalable. (“the facility”). The facility provides a blockchain-powered network that is both economical and efficient because it eliminates duplication of efforts and reduces the need for intermediaries. The facility gives participants the ability to share a ledger that is constantly updated and every time a transaction occurs. Each participant in the network acts as both a publisher and a subscriber and the data is synchronized across the network as it is transferred. The facility provides a solution that is also less vulnerable because transactions can be verified and committed to the ledger through various consensus models to validate information; this process ensures clarity of content ownership. Transactions are secure, authenticated, and verifiable.

#The facility makes available to all content owners watermarking/fingerprinting technology so an identifier (e.g., a unique code) can be embedded in the content (e.g., video/audio portion of each video content asset). The facility utilizes blockchain technology to add information related to each unique identifier in a database and allows an authorized user (e.g., the owner) to update the information through a blockchain transaction. Examples of information include, but are not limited to identity of authorized users, contact information (e.g., e-mail, telephone number or any other details that other platforms use to identify user account), current rightsholder(s) (e.g., editor, user, subscriber, distributer, etc.), sublicensee who has the rights to sublicense to another party, markets (U.S., Germany, Japan, etc.), language rights, etc. The facility provides identity verifier software that can be used by a content sharing platform/service to read a unique identifier (e.g., #1010101012) used in their service and query the facility's blockchain repository to read the data related to that unique identifier. Once the content sharing platform/service identifies that content is re-broadcasted with no permission on an online content provider's page, the facility provides a variety of options to act against the infringer or unauthorized content. For example, the facility enables the content sharing platform/service to sequester the content for limited period, notify the owner of the content, takedown the content, etc.