Strengthening Video Integrity and Anti-Duplication Measures with Blockchain Innovations

The emergence of the digital era has had a significant impact on the channels humans use to communicate. And with the increasing popularity of multimedia distribution channels, the law finds it difficult to adapt the traditional legal notions of privacy and intellectual property ownership rights to the digitalization of tangible goods and assets. As these modern digital assets, viz., videos and audio, do not constitute property in most countries, it is more challenging to employ conventional legal protection. Besides, several applications for copyright objection, duplication detection, and the current media can be manipulated or tampered with in different ways to erase any proof of content modification histories and propagate false objectives. Thus, it is crucial for organizations to detect and eliminate multimedia duplication to protect the intellectual property rights of a creator. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that allows one to manage data more efficiently by addressing copyright and data duplication issues over modern multimedia channels such as Facebook, YouTube, etc., leveraging blockchain technology. The proposed blockchain-based framework encapsulates the diverse content of every multimedia file with a hash using different cryptographic hashing technologies, such as perceptual hashing. Moreover, to make the entire process more secure, the proposed architecture develops a hash for every file using the Merkle Tree. The computed hash is then stored inside the decentralized database in order to preserve a historical audit trail. The proposed architecture holds promise to detect and address video duplication, ensuring secure and immutable protection against content tampering.