At the beginning of 2019, Tencent, together with China Electronics Technology Group Network Information Security Co., LTD. (hereinafter referred to as China Network Security) and Beiming Software Co., LTD. (hereinafter referred to as Beiming Software) jointly launched the “Zhixin Chain” trusted storage blockchain application platform. In April 2019, Zhixinlink joined hands with Tencent Content center “Penguin” to provide digital copyright protection for original authors. So far, more than 10 million original articles have been protected on Zhixinlink.

Chain “to the letter” for more than a year, tencent cloud blocks to chain for the underlying technical support “to chain letter” to protect more than 10 million of the original work, cooperate with the penguins, “a key rights’ rights protection system and successful shelves infringing works 8 million times, average daily rights of more than 30000 times, for the majority of original content creators to maintain the legitimate rights and interests.

After one year of exploration and practice, the team of “Xilin” has gained some experience. This paper will talk about how we use the new technology of blockchain to try to solve the old problem of copyright protection from four aspects:

• What is blockchain and communication chain?

• Why: Use blockchain to solve copyright protection problems?

• How: How can we use blockchain to solve blockchain version problems?

• Think: What else can blockchain do for the copyright industry in the future?

What is blockchain and communication chain?

1. What is blockchain?

We can think of blockchain simply as a tamper-resistant data ledger maintained by multiple parties, and the tamper-resistant capabilities of blockchain provide important “certainty.” In the Internet environment, only the permission can add, delete, modify, and query an existing data element, which will bring a lot of uncertainty to a data element.

For example, when judicial institutions solve online disputes, electronic evidence used to judge facts is easy to tamper with, but it is difficult to determine whether it has been tampered with. This problem brings challenges for judges to try such online disputes. Copyright infringement is an important part of online disputes.

2. What is a mail chain?

Tencent, China Net Security and Beiming Software jointly launched the “Zhixin Chain”, and the three parties are committed to building the “Zhixin Chain” into an infrastructure in the field of intelligent justice. Firstly, it is applied to the preservation and fixation of key electronic data/electronic evidence in online disput-prone scenarios, such as online copyright infringement and online financial lending disputes.

Strategic cooperation signing ceremony of “Zhixinlian”

The business system with storage requirements can be connected through the SDK provided by “Zhixinlian”, which can be connected in real time when the dispute-prone electronic data is generated. Later, evidence can be submitted online in the lawsuit. At the same time, it can be proved whether the evidence has been tampered by comparing the current evidence with the evidence stored at the time of production. If the comparison is correct, the current evidence can be proved to be original and authenticity can be deduced to some extent. The basic principle of blockchain storage is shown in the figure below.

At present, the existing court, copyright administration, public notaries public institutions as nodes to join “to the letter chain alliance”, as shown in the figure below, many organizations to participate in the security chain data do not tamper with, at the same time to chain letter platform provides the function of digital ability, such as line copyright certification, such as online notarization ability, to solve the problem based on electronic data reliable.

“To the letter chain” solves the problem of electronic evidence credibility. According to the revised Provisions on Evidence in Civil Procedure (effective from May 1, 2020), electronic evidence fixed with blockchain technology will be far superior to ordinary electronic evidence in terms of authenticity and evidence validity. Since 2018, Tencent has taken the lead in participating in the “China Mobile Micro Court” project, which now covers more than 3,500 courts in China. At present, “Zhixin Chain” is actively promoting the docking work with “China Mobile Micro Court”, after the completion of the docking can realize the real-time storage of “Zhixin Chain” can be submitted to local courts through “China Mobile micro Court” in case of disputes, litigation costs will be greatly reduced. In the copyright infringement dispute, it also has a powerful legal weapon to safeguard the rights and interests of the originator.

Why: Copyright protection with blockchain?

1. The original author is repeatedly infringed

The pirated copying digital content industry in severe cases, with tencent, for example, “penguin” signing a large number of authorship, produce about 300000 articles every day, of which about 150000 infringed, the article has been washed draft copy, some infringed parties intact release on friendly business platform, more than 50% of the overall infringement, original content creators to bring huge losses.

Piracy and plagiarism are clearly illegal behaviors. By helping judicial/law enforcement departments to realize that infringement will be punished and violations of the law will be prosecuted, the infringers will be severely punished. The cost of realizing infringement is greater than the benefits of infringement, making the infringement unsustainable.

2. Long cycle of traditional rights protection and difficult to obtain evidence

After understanding, despite such a high infringement rate, Penguin has not initiated legal action against any infringing party. After analysis, it is found that there are two major pain points in judicial proceedings:

(1) Conventional offline judicial proceedings have long process, long time and high cost.

② Online infringement disputes, electronic evidence is easy to tamper with, difficult to identify, the court acceptance rate is not high, there is a risk of losing the lawsuit.

How to reduce the cost of litigation and solve the problem of electronic evidence identification “To the letter chain” team proposed the countermeasures:

① “micro court” can realize online litigation, breaking through the limitation of physical space, saving time and effort.

② “To the letter chain” through the block chain technology to solve the problem of electronic data/evidence tampering, evidence generation is real-time on the chain storage, in the data generation source to ensure the proof of evidence.

How: How to use blockchain to solve copyright problems?

After making clear the digital judicial litigation means to crack down on infringers, the “Zhixinlian” team and Tencent legal team quickly worked out a plan, using “Zhixinlian” to solidified the following key steps, so as to form a complete and credible evidence chain in the litigation process.

① Determine the evidence of ownership (prove that this article belongs to me, not ta)

(2) Solidify evidence of infringement (I found that TA infringes my rights, and I want to solidify TA’s infringement)

The whole process of the scheme is shown in the figure below:

The first step is to determine evidence of ownership: Based on the principle of block chain that can not be tampered with, we did API (application interface) docking with the article publishing system When the penguin original article was published, so as to publish the article and automatically link up. After the link up, four W’s were solidified: When (publication time), Who (author), What (published content) and Where (which domain name). There are also relevant credibility nodes on the chain, such as the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Capital Copyright Protection Center, courts and other institutions that can witness the unique electronic Hash value of the work information.

After the ownership information is fixed, the author can choose whether to carry out copyright authentication and copyright registration on the chain to further prove the ownership of the article.

Example of electronic data storage certificate

The second step is to solidify evidence of infringement: scan and locate infringement platforms on the Internet through the infringement monitoring system, collect evidence of infringement on web pages through the online forensics tool “Zhixin Chain”, and solidify evidence on the chain. It also solidifies four evidence elements: Who (infringer), Where (domain name – network space), When (What time) and What (infringing content).

The third step, deterrence rights protection: copyright dispute litigation to take out the earliest credible original proof and credible evidence of infringement, basically can win. The first step is to publish the evidence of ownership, and the second step is to solidify the evidence of infringement. At this point, the chain of evidence has been very clear, “Penguin” can automatically send relevant information to the infringing party, order it to take down the plagiarism article, or the court, waiting for the loss of compensation.

Step 4: Online litigation: If the other party is still stubborn and refuses to take down the infringing content, it can submit relevant electronic evidence through the online litigation platform “Micro Court” for online litigation.

Traditional offline rights protection requires a lot of time to prepare relevant materials, notarize or authenticate relevant evidence, and go to court. The process is long, time-consuming and costly, which blocks many original authors from protecting their rights. Under the overall solution of “to the letter chain”, the whole process can be realized online, which greatly reduces the time cost and money cost required by litigation, so that we have low-cost and efficient rights protection ability.

To sum up, the overall solution of “Zhixin Chain” provides creators with easy-to-use, low-cost ability to confirm rights, obtain evidence, and online litigation. It lowers the threshold of cracking down on infringers, so that every creator and creation platform can conveniently use digital legal weapons to protect their knowledge achievements. Only when the reality of infringement is investigated and piracy is punished, can the problem of infringement and piracy be fundamentally solved, the full protection of original content be achieved, and the healthy development of digital content industry be helped.

Up to now, Zhixin Chain has connected with many platforms such as Qigoose, ISUX Original Library and Tencent Games, with more than 100,000 deposits per day.

What else can blockchain do for the copyright industry in the future?

The Internet is a great, great basic logic is the implementation of the information transfer cost tends to zero, this has created our prosperity of Internet life, online social networking, digital content, service life and so on, but the Internet without a “certainty”, the lack of “value” or asset transfer based method, This in many scenarios for our life and production, and block chain have “certainty”, the block also known as value chain transfer tools, we further study and the use of chain blocks, to gradually cognition, block to realize the value transfer chain can cost tends to zero, this feature will bring great changes to existing information on the Internet.

After contacting the blockchain + copyright business, we have been thinking about a question: what can the attributes of digital content be? An article or a design work can indeed be defined as information from the perspective of readers and audiences. Information is easy to be copied and tampered with on the Internet, which brings trouble to the content creators. The content produced at the cost is reproduced and copied, and the due benefits cannot be fully obtained.

Gradually, we have some ideas about whether digital content can be abstracted as assets. Digital content should be information to the audience, “value” to the creator, and assets should not be copied or illegally tampered with. Assets can be used by authorization and can bring income to the owner of the asset. Assets can be traded, and after an asset is traded, the seller loses and buys and gains. Assets are unique and cannot be double-paid.

We imagine a scenario in which a huge value network is established based on blockchain, involving government authorities, regulatory agencies, enterprises and individuals. Content creators who produce works can go on the chain, and after being certified by the government authority node, they can issue a non-exchangeable Token (Token) on the chain, which is the proof of the assets of this article. Tokens can move around the chain freely, they can be traded freely, they can be sold, split, licensed, and they can be mortgaged.

Correspondingly, creators can freely choose which channel platform to put content on, and sign a smart contract with the platform after putting content on. The income generated by the article will be automatically divided according to the proportion of the smart contract (the release of the CENTRAL bank DECP will make this scenario possible).

Creators can also authorize others to adapt their works on this value network platform. The relevant agreements can also form a smart contract, and the adapted works can be freely released, and the profits obtained can be automatically divided according to the agreed proportion of the contract.

Creators can sell their work for cash, or take out a mortgage to continue their work after it is valued on a financial platform. Even a work of Token can be split, for example, ordinary people can not buy a complete high-value work of art, after the split of Token works can choose to buy 1/1000 or 1/10,000 to participate in the investment of art works.

Works of art can also become digital assets

In the blockchain value network, works become assets rather than information that can be copied infinitely and tampered with at will. Digital works have been capitalized in the value network, and have the attributes used by all assets, such as certainty and liquidity. All work assets have a definite right holder, all work licensing relationships are recorded by a definite and untampered smart contract, and all infringements will be quickly located and punished.

Blockchain, as a value delivery tool, builds a value network connecting all people, which will bring tremendous changes to the current society. The change degree is even equal to the change brought to our life and production after the emergence of the Internet.