System for Recording Ownership of Digital Works and Providing Backup Copies

A method for communicating with a secure storage system for maintaining ownership rights of digital works, the method comprising:

• generating a cryptographically verifiable ledger represented by a sequence of blocks that is stored in one or more non-transitory computer-readable media, each block containing one or more transactions records and each subsequent block containing a hash value associated with the previous block, wherein at least one of the blocks contains transaction records associated with ownership a digital work, and wherein the at least one of the blocks that contains transaction records associated with ownership of the digital work includes restrictions associated with transfers of the digital work;
• receiving a first request, from at least one user terminal device, to obtain the digital work;
• determining whether the restrictions associated with the transfer of the digital work prevents satisfying the request;
• transferring a first instance of the digital work to the at least one user terminal device in response to determining that transfer of the digital work in response to the first request is authorized;
• generating an ownership file for the first instance of the digital work;
• and
• concatenating a new block to the sequence of blocks, the new block including the ownership file and new restrictions associated with transfer of the first instance of the digital work.

A non-transitory computer-readable medium storing instructions that are executable by a processing device, wherein execution of the instructions by the processing device causes the processing device to:

• generate a cryptographically verifiable ledger represented by a sequence of blocks that is stored in one or more non-transitory computer-readable media, each block containing one or more transactions records and each subsequent block containing a hash value associated with the previous block, wherein at least one of the blocks contains transaction records associated with ownership a digital work, and wherein the at least one of the blocks that contains transaction records associated with ownership of the digital work includes restrictions associated with transfers of the digital work;
• receive a first request, from at least one user terminal device, to obtain the digital work;
• determine whether the restrictions associated with the transfer of the digital work prevents satisfying the request;
• transfer a first instance of the digital work to the at least one user terminal device from the computing system in response to determining that transfer of the digital work in response to the first request is authorized;
• generate an ownership file for the first instance of the digital work;
• and
• concatenate a new block to the sequence of blocks, the new block including the ownership file and new restrictions associated with transfer of the first instance of the digital work.