Sony’s digital rights management system is blockchain-powered

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Electronic giant Sony has announced that it has developed a blockchain-based rights management system for digital content.

The new digital rights management (DRM) system builds on Sony and Sony Global Education’s platform for authenticating, sharing and rights management of educational data, according to the company. The new DRM system adds functionality for processing rights-related information, and will support digital contents such as ebooks, music, films, audio, games, scientific data, medical data, video, and VR content, among others.

Content rights, according to the Japanese firm, still rely on conventional methods and a more effective means of proof of ownership was needed. This led Sony to file for a patent in April for a system that utilizes the blockchain in storing users’ digital rights data.

The company also revealed that the new DRM framework is built on a prior blockchain system they produced in collaboration with IBM last December. The system began by storing educational data such as degrees, diplomas, tests and other similar products.

Sony described some of the functionality of the system in a statement saying, “[It is] specialized for managing rights-related information of written works, with features for demonstrating the date and time that electronic data was created, leveraging the properties of blockchains to record verifiable information in a difficult to falsify way, and identifying previously recorded works, allowing participants to share and verify when a piece of electronic data was created and by whom.”

Although Sony has yet to name the project or the type of blockchain it would utilize, it is already considering commercialising the system. Also, Sony Group has a lot of plans for its future in the blockchain space. The firm reveals that it is also “considering innovative ways to make use of blockchain technology for information management and data distribution in a host of different fields.”