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BMCProtector: A Blockchain and Smart Contract Based Application for Music

Copyright Protection

Conference Paper · December 2018

DOI: 10.1145/3301403.3301404

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 BMCProtector: A Blockchain and Smart Contract
Based Application for Music Copyright Protection

Sijia Zhao Donal O’Mahony

School of Computer Science and Statistics School of Computer Science and Statistics
Trinity College Dublin Trinity College Dublin
College Green, Dublin, Ireland College Green, Dublin, Ireland
Email: [email protected] Email: [email protected]

Abstract—In this paper, we explore the design and construct

a prototype implementation of an Ethereum application, BM-
CProtector, which is based on Blockchain and Smart Contract
technology, to protect music copyright and ensure rights holders
income rights. With the blockchain, musicians can easily autho-
rize and manage their music copyright on a public ledger. Without
intermediaries being involved during the propagation process,
rights holders can receive a greater share of royalty payments
from the music industry automatically and instantly. We also deal
with piracy issues using encryption and watermarking methods.
BMCProtector provides a solution to protect music copyright
more effectively.
Keywords—Blockchain, Smart Contract, Copyright.
Fig. 1. Digital Music Supply Chain [1]

I. I NTRODUCTION
The development of technology has had a great effect on
and Singular-value decomposition transforms to embed and
the creation and dissemination of digital media and created
a new music format: digital music. Digital music improves extract watermarks in video data aiming to prevent different
the efficiency of music dissemination and reduces costs in the kinds of attacks.
industry. With the Internet, everyone in the world can enjoy Music copyright itself can be tracked and protected by
music from a digital music platform which makes large scale digital watermarking and steganography to some extent. How-
propagation possible. The emergence and development of digi- ever, there has been no efficient method to protect artists
tal music not only increases consumption, but also creates new income rights until blockchain technology and smart contracts
problems about how to protect copyright and artists incomes in appeared. Since digital music sharing platforms have been
the Internet era. The first problem is copyright. A few listeners established, the music industry has been in turmoil. Income
can purchase music and download or copy it from the Internet transmission has a lack of transparency which causes different
and spread it to others for free infringing the artists’ copyright. parties during the process to charge money step by step, and
Another problem is correctly calculating artists income. Some only a small part of income is eventually received by artists.
musical works in services like Google Music are free or almost Blockchain technology provides a method to balance conflicts
free to listen and download while other works need to be of interest. The blockchain is a public ledger and everyone
purchased. There are also intermediaries, like propagators and has the chance to confirm transactions and read data in the
agents, which will extract royalties along the route. This means chain. The payment can be transferred by cryptocurrencies,
that artists put a lot of effort into writing music, but earn little including digital coins, like Bitcoin [5], Bitcoin Cash, Ripple,
from their works. The digital music supply chain is shown in Litecoin, and other kinds of token, like Ether and ERC20
Figure 1. [6] format tokens, which can be used in smart contracts
Musicians, composers, and researchers have been search- [7]. With smart contracts, payment and distribution can be
ing for ways to protect copyright for several years. Digital operated automatically without control from a central authority.
The stakeholders details will also be included into the smart
Watermarking is a significant way to protect copyright and
contract which can be viewed by all. Therefore, payments can
track the spreading path to detect forgery or imitation. Hartung
be easily tracked which avoids unauthorized collection of fees
and Kutter [2] reviewed requirements and applications for
by intermediaries due to opaque information.
watermarking, and discussed robustness and security aspects
in detail. Anderson and Petitcolas [3] presented a unified In this paper, we propose and implement a prototype of
terminology for steganography and outlined several approaches an application to protect music copyright using Blockchain
to hide encrypted copyright marks, and outlined potential and Smart Contracts. This paper consists of six sections and
attacks on steganography schemes. Ponnisathya [4] proposed is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces the categories
an approach which combines the Discrete Wavelet Transform of music copyright. Section 3 describes reasons that the
blockchain technology and smart contracts can be applied in B. Payment without third parties
music copyright protection. Section 4 discusses applications There are many intermediaries involved in music dissemi-
that use blockchain technology to protect music copyrights. nation that deduct fees, like copyright agents. After the many
Section 5 proposes our music copyright protection scheme. deductions, only a small amount of money remains for the
Section 6 describes the implementation of our project. We copyright owners. In addition, many platforms pay royalties
evaluate the project in Section 7. Finally, section 8 concludes
by bank transfer. The process is always slow and may take
the paper.
several days to come to the intermediate company and months
or years to get to the actual rights owners. As a stable P2P
II. M USIC C OPYRIGHT
network platform, the blockchain can build a direct bridge
Music copyright is the right for musicians to control what between musicians and consumers. It can ensure that musicians
they have created. It includes the right to perform, transmit, receive their royalty payments on time, and avoid unnecessary
reproduce, claim authorship and protect the integrity of works. deductions from intermediaries. With smart contracts, the
Copyright allows creators and their business partners to use royalty payment method is wired into the contract. Once the
these controls to make a profit.There are two kinds of copyright music is downloaded, the revenue is distributed automatically
you would face when you listen to a song on the Internet or to different parties without the need for intermediaries. That
a radio. will reduce the deduction of third parties and improve the
efficiency of transmission of royalty payments.
A. Musical Composition
The composition consists of music and lyrics. Participants IV. T HE M USIC A PPLICATIONS BASED ON B LOCKCHAIN
in the musical composition are songwriters, composers, pub- T ECHNOLOGY
lishers and right administrators.
Several start-up companies are beginning to explore the
B. Sound Recording protection of music copyright with blockchain and smart
contract technology.
A sound recording involves musical instruments, singing
and spoken voice by humans or animals. The authors of
A. Ujo
this part are the performers and the record producers. The
interests of copyright owners are easily infringed by interme- Ujo [9] is a music company which aims to build an
diaries, illegal propagation. The effect of intermediaries has Ethereum based music supply chain and was founded in 2015.
been described above. For illegal propagation, once consumers It allows musicians to register their music on the Ethereum
download a song, they can use it offline. Some dishonest users blockchain and their fans can use these musical works through
may upload the song as if it was their work and it may then streaming and downloads. Ujo music uses schema.org, an
be propagated online. Others can download this music without online community, to create, maintain and improve structured
payment. With illegal propagation, copyright owners cannot data schemas. Ujo builds a data set, including the musical
recover their royalties. All licensing bodies use some kind of work name, title, International Standard Musical Work Code
central copyright databases. Different countries, even different (ISWC) [10], release date and explicit content, and then
companies will maintain different databases [8], which makes translates the data to fit with the COALA IP specification [11],
the assessment of infringement more difficult. a licensing framework for digital assests, to allow others to
access licensing information more easily. In Ujo, audio files
III.W HY THE B LOCKCHAIN AND S MART C ONTRACTS and images are stored on a distributed file storage system,
CAN BE APPLIED IN M USIC C OPYRIGHT P ROTECTION called the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) [12]. Fans can
Blockchains allow for the maintenance of a distributed separately buy components of a song, such as drums, vocals,
database, with unchangeable and transparent data. With bass, strings or synth. Ujo music provides a platform to access
blockchain technology, the industry can build a global database music for fans and receive royalties for artists. However, there
for copyright of music and help to directly increase the income is not too much consideration on the copyright protection after
of musicians and copyright owners, and improve transparency fans purchase a song.
by displaying transactions in the public chain.
B. Dot Blockchain Music
A. A global database for music copyright DotBlockchain [13] is established by the PledgeMusic
There are many online music platforms, such as Google Company, a start-up company in New York. The platform
Play Music, iTunes, and YouTube. All the information about creates a new music format, called .bc or dotBC. On the
the music, including the sound recording, underlying lyrics DotBlockchain platform, when an artist or rights holder pub-
and the copyright owner data, is stored in the database of each lishes their musical work, they will create a .bc file instead
company. The information about music in different databases of a standard audio file. Music data is bundled into a .bc
may have some differences. It is difficult to reconcile these file, including information on songwriters, performers, and the
differences. The blockchain is a public distributed ledger. title of the music. Once this step is completed, all information
When a node connects to the blockchain network, all the is written into the blockchain and available for the public.
information is updated and synchronized automatically, and Specialized players will use .bc rules to decode metadata and
every member has the same information. Blockchain technol- authorize or reject the play request. Figure 2 shows the process
ogy finally allows for the creation of a single global database of publishing music works to DotBlockchain. This is the first
for music copyright come true. phase of DotBlockchain.
 an approach for undiscovered artists to gain public attention.
However, like Ujo, PeerTracks also put less attention on the
copyright protection itself in the current stage.

D. Bittunes
Fig. 2. Publishment process in DotBlockchain Bittunes [18] operates on the Bitcoin Blockchain forming
a distributed music network which is organized by Bittunes
Pty. Ltd, an Australian start-up company. It uses bitcoin as
In phase 2 [14] which began in October 2017, Dot- the digital currency. It is a platform that provides benefits not
Blockchain Music clarified more details of their implementa- only for artists, but also for fans. Musicians can automatically
tion. The details are described in Figure 3. In December,2012, receive their royalties in bitcoin, and fans can share a percent-
there were more than 65 million songs that DotBlockchain had age of the remainder. For example, in a smart contract, 80
permission to use. percent of the royalties could be directed to copyright holders,
and the remaining 20 percent will be randomly given to five
consumers. The more times a song is purchased, the more
money will return to participants, including musicians and
fans. In order to implement Micro Payments, Bittunes will use
sidechain technology [19] which enables bitcoins and other
tokens to be transferred between different blockchains. Each
Fig. 3. Architecture of DotBlockchain song has an ID in the blockchain and this ID will be embedded
to the audio file. However, this mechanism can only identify
the copyright owner. If the song is distributed illegally by an
The copyright data includes details of performer, aggre- purchaser after download it, the audio file cannot be tracked.
gator, label, Demand-Side Platform (DSP), Performing Rights Figure 4 shows the architecture of Bittunes.
Organization (PRO), publisher and composer. DSPs are plat-
forms like Apple music and Spotify which provide an interface
to manage data exchange. PROs act as copyright collectives
or agencies which provide intermediary functions between
copyright purchaser and copyright owners. These data are
combined together into a .bc file and registered to Hyper-
Ledger Sawtooth. HyperLedger Sawtooth is an open-source
framework for building and running blockchains. There are
five partner companies which, together with DotBlockchain,
protect music ownership. They are a) SOCAN, a Canadian-
based performance rights organization, b) MeidaNet, SOCANs
rights administration subsidiary, c) Songtrust, publishing roy-
alty administrator, d) CdBaby, an indie music distributor, and
e) FUGA, a digital rights service. [15] DotBlockchain uses .bc
files to collect and protect the copyright information. However,
it can only be decoded by their specific music player which
has limitation for the widely use. Fig. 4. Architecture of Bittunes

C. PeerTracks MUSE
PeerTracks is a U.S. company that produces a streaming E. Other platforms
platform based on the MUSE Blockchain [16]. The Alpha
version of PeerTracks was launched in 2015. It uses Delegated Besides the applications and technologies we introduced
Proof of Stake (DPoS) [17] to achieve distributed consensus above, there are some other organizations or companies pro-
on its private blockchain. Any artist can create his own token moting blockchain-based music applications or copyright pro-
on PeerTracks and have its ownership recorded on the MUSE tection schemes. Berkeley College of Music together with
Blockchain. A buyer could read the licensing conditions of the M.I.T Media Lab and other partners, including YouTube,
a song and purchase the rights to use it directly on the Spotify, and Intel, established the ’Open Music Initiative’ [20]
blockchain. A token provides an incentive mechanism in the in order to build a blockchain-based architecture to track and
PeerTracks platform. PeerTracks uses the MUSE blockchain manage payment for the music industry. SingularDTV [21]
is another music platform, established by a United States
to allow every artist on their platform to create their own
company, which based on the Ethereum blockchain. It shares
tokens. Tokens are limited in number and their value is volatile.
the same idea with PeerTracks, that artists can create their
If the artist is very popular on the platform, his token will
be worth more. The artist can directly give their tokens to own token and use it to raise funds. Also, it has the same
fans. If fans hold the token, they can get discounts on the problems as PeerTracks, lack of offline copyright protection
musical work or related merchandise, including concert tickets after purchased by fans.
and backstage passes. It is a good way to motivate fans to In the following section, we propose a new music copyright
interact with the platform to support their artists. It is also protection scheme which not only assures the rights holders
income stream, but also considers protection and tracks the access the file. In order to withdraw this limitation, we encrypt
copyright itself after a song has been purchased. In addition, audio files to protect the security of them. Key management
we have a versioning system to help copyright owners update is used to manage the decryption key. Digital signatures avoid
smart contracts when something went wrong. the man-in-the-middle attack during the key exchange process.
Access control limits the access permission when the expiry
V. P ROPOSED M USIC C OPYRIGHT P ROTECTION S CHEME date of the audio file is coming. In this layer, there is nothing to
stop pirates from uploading other versions of the musical work.
The aim of this paper is to design an Ethereum-based However, it can be used to recognize illegal or unauthorized
application which provides an automated, globally ownerless, work.
distributed platform for musicians to protect copyright of their
musical works. It must ensure that musicians can authorize For the View Layer, users can interact with our application.
and manage copyright independently. Without third parties, Musicians can upload their musical works using this applica-
such as banks and music companies involved in the payment tion. Fans can search, purchase, download and listen to audio
process, rights holders can receive almost all their royalties. In files from our application. Information that musicians input
addition, unlike platforms we introduced above, our scheme on the application will be added to the smart contract by the
has mechanisms to protect the music copyright after a song web3.js service, a Javascript API which makes the interaction
is purchased by fans and the spreading path can also be between Web application and Ethereum nodes possible. After
tracked by our platform. Figure 6 shows the implementation the audio file is downloaded by fans, fans can play it locally
architecture. without interacting with the blockchain.

VI. I MPLEMENTATION
In this section, we will describe the main features of the
implementation. The details are shown in Figure 7.

Fig. 5. BMCProtector Framework

For the Network Layer, users are linked through the

blockchain network. Each user accesses the system through a
node in the blockchain. A user can use services only when
he has synchronized information of the whole chain. This
confirms that the same ledger is shared among all users.
For the Storage Layer, due to the limitation of the block
size, about 20k bytes for each Ethereum block in March 19th
2018 [22], it is impossible to store the audio files in the
blockchain. In addition, each node needs to synchronize the
whole data on the blockchain. If we store too many large files
Fig. 6. BMCProtector System Implementation
on the blockchain, it is a waste of network resources. IPFS is
used as an external storage platform. It is a Peer-to-Peer storage
platform which uses a content delivery protocol to retrieve In the system, there are two kinds of users: fans and
and share objects. Each file has its own fingerprint hash when musicians. A musician can upload their musical works and
uploaded to the IPFS platform as an identifier. People who have earn royalty payments from fans automatically. Fans can search
this value can retrieve files from the platform. Smart contracts and pay for a musical work they like, and get permission to
in the blockchain are used to store the basic information, like
listen to music. The implementation is based on an Ethereum
the music title, copyright owner, and IPFS hash which confirms
testnet chain, Ropsten, which can help us to get free test token.
this data is unchangeable and traceable.
We use the Meteor.js framework for our application. It will
The Service Layer contains functions that users need to make our distributed application faster when it is loaded. We
operate. We use a watermark to add the copyright owner only need to load the specific element instead of the whole
information to the audio file and allows tracking the ownership HTML page. Each copyright owner needs to pass the identity
off-line. IPFS use content address to find the file itself. The verification in our platform before using services to avoid
IPFS address will be contained in the smart contract in our illegal upload and royalties distribution. The following are the
system. If the content address leak, it means everyone can main parts of the application.
 TABLE I. N OTIFICATION D ESCRIPTION

Symbol Meaning
g Large Prime Number
x Random number, a private value chose by the musician
y Random number, a private value chose by the key protection center
CertM Certificate of the musician
CertK P C Certificate of the key protection center
k shared key for both the musician and the key protection center
SigM Signed by the musician using his private key
SigK P C Signed by the key protection center using its private key
Ek Encrypted by shared key, k

A. Tracking Copyright
Digital watermarking is a kind of technology that embeds
digital information into digital media to track and reveal the
copyright owner and purchaser. In this paper, a vector quan-
tization method [23] is used to embed multiple watermarks. Fig. 7. Music Upload Encryption Method
The copyright holder who first publishes the musical work
can embed an original watermark. The fans watermark will
be embedded into the song automatically when the song is music smart contract.
purchased by a fan and this will help to track the propagation When a fan wants to purchase music, he can get the public
path. Once illegal propagation of this audio file happens, the value of the musician, g x , and connect to the Key Protection
copyright owner can discover the original purchaser. Center to generate the full key. The audio file will then be
decrypted by the key.
B. Audio File Encryption
When a node connects to the IPFS system, they can access C. Upload Audio File to IPFS
any file if they have the hash address. To prevent illegal Our system uses the IPFS platform as our external dis-
download, before uploading the song to IPFS platform, that tributed storage. We use JavaScript code to connect to IPFS,
song should be encrypted to secure it. However, if we write upload a file and return a hash code which is used to retrieve
the key to the smart contract, it is possible to be viewed the specific file later. Once we have the hash value from IPFS,
by anyone. Therefore, we introduce a third party, the Key this hash will be integrated with other copyright parameters
Protection Center, to help agree the key with musicians and and stored in the smart contract.
decrypt the file without disclosing the key to customers. The
key agreement uses the Station-to-Station protocol which based D. Music Smart Contract
on classic DiffieHellman and can protect against man-in-the-
In this system, we use Solidity, a programming language
middle attack. This key will be input to the AES algorithm to
specifically designed for blockchain platforms, to write smart
encrypt the audio file.
contracts for musical works. This smart contract defines oper-
Figure 7 shows the purchase process including the encryp- ations for copyright parameters and functions that are used
tion step. Details are described step by step in the following. to distribute payment. When a musician publishes a song,
Table 1 specifying the meaning of each variable. the system will call that smart contract on their behalf, input
(1) The musician chooses g and random x, then caculates g x . parameters to the contract and register the contract in the
g x together with g will be sent to the Key Protection Center. blockchain. The copyright parameters include,
(2) Once the Key Protection Center gets g x and g, it will
generate g y and send it to the musician. During this process, • Title
both the musician and the key protection center can get the • Album
share key, k = (g x )y . • Publishing year
(3) The Key Protection Center signs (g y , g x ) with its private • Artist, Songwriter, Composition owner, Record owner
key, and encrypts the signature with the key, k. The Certificate • The International Standard Recording Code and Inter-
of the Key Protection Center, CertK P C, and the encrypted national Standard Musical Work Code
signature will be sent to the musician. The public key which • Owners wallet address, Artist wallet address, Song-
used to verify the signature is acquired through CertK P C writer wallet address, Composition owner wallet ad-
through PKI [24]. dress, Sound record owner wallet address
(4) The musician will then sign (g x , g y ) by his private key • IPFSHash
and encrypt it with the same shared key. The Certificate of • Public value of the musician, g x
M and encrypted signature will be sent to the Key Protection • Total price and the royalty to be paid to all parties
Center. The Key Protection Center will verify the signature by
the public key of the musician. Usernames and wallet addresses, including artist, song-
(5) The musician can use the shared key, k, with the AES writer, composition owner, record owner, are collected by our
algorithm to encrypt the audio. g x is then written into the platform before using services.
E. Royalties Distribution
In BMProtector, we use a RoyaltyDistribution Contract to
distribute the royalties to different copyright owners. When the
music publisher publishes the musical work to our platform, he
needs to provide the copyright parameters which we mentioned
above. When a fan finishes the purchase process, the Royalty-
Distribution Contract will be called which automatically sends
royalties to the wallet address of the artist, the songwriter,
the composition owner and the sound record owner. Figure 8
shows the process of royalties distribution.

Fig. 9. Process of the Versioning System

decrypt it. With watermarking, the platform can track music

Fig. 8. Process of Royalties distribution and detect when it is used by unauthorized users. We employ
an access control mechanism in BMCProtector, which can
define the expiry date of the music at the point of payment.
F. Music File Access Control The BMCProtector considers both online and offline copyright
If copyright owners do not want to give permanent access protection during implementation. In addition, our platform
right to the fans, they can use the access control mechanism to allows publishers to modify data in the smart contract if some
specify the royalty price for a period of time. An access control wrong happens.
mechanism is used for the audio file after it is purchased by
fans to protect music copyright outside the blockchain. At VII. E VALUATION
payment time, a fan chooses how long he wants to use this
song and this data will be detected by the music player. After The system was implemented on a Ubuntu 16.04 desk-
the expiry date, the music will be no longer available. top with an IntelCorei5. We use the Go implementation of
Ethereum to deploy a testchain, geth v1.8.2 which uses Proof-
of-Work as the consensus protocol. The smart contract is
G. Versioning System
implemented in solidity [25].
We use a Versioning System to update the data in smart Our BMCProtector uses the blockchain and smart contract
contracts. The main idea of the Versioning System is to technology to solve these challenges. All the copyright infor-
forward a function call to a new contract which is an update. mation can be tracked in the blockchain and people around
Figure 10 shows the process of the Versioning System. The
the world can share the same copyright ledger in the public
Original contract holds the state of the contract, including
blockchain. Stakeholders can agree on the rules in the smart
copyright parameters. The MusicBasicInfo1 contract is the first
contract, like the percentage of royalties due to each partici-
contract which defined by the copyright publisher with exact pant. When the smart contract is committed to the blockchain,
value. OwnershipCheck contract is used to ensure that only these rules operate automatically and no one can reduce the
the publisher can set a new value for the parameter. After royalties to others. Once fans purchase a song on our platform,
verified, FindContractAdd contract helps to modify the states stakeholders defined in the smart contract immediately receive
of the Original contract it inherited. their royalties after the transaction is confirmed by the public
As the example we show in Figure 10, the FindContrac- blockchain.
tAdd contract first points to the MusicBasicInfo contract. If We introduced several music platforms which are based
the publisher needs to modify the MusicBasicInfo1 contract, on the blockchain and smart contracts, and we now compare
he can generate a new contract, MusicBasicInfo2. Then he can these platforms with our design. The blockchain now cannot
set the FindContractAdd contract to point to this new contract track the copyright off the chain. After being purchased, the
address. musical work still risks being released to the public which
In BMCProtector, the IPFS service is used to store the results in copyright holders not receiving their royalties. Ujo
music file which aims to reduce the storage pressure on and PeerTracks are lack of off-line copyright protection cur-
the blockchain. Unlike traditional cloud storage, files can be rently. DotBlockchain uses a specific file format to protect
published safely using hashes. Before being published into the the copyright. However, it reduces the potential for widely
IPFS platform, the musical work needs to be encrypted. We distribution. In this paper, we use an existing watermarking
use the Station-to-Station protocol for participants to achieve technology, the vector quantization method, to track ownership
key agreement and utilize the AES algorithm to encrypt the of the music off the blockchain. For online listeners, we also
audio file. Only users who paid for it can get the key to use access control to manage the expiry date of the music.
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