Windows operating organization and Office productivity suite have always been top performers on any software piracy platforms. So, it'due south no wonder that Microsoft, the developer of both products, works difficult to establish anti-piracy measures.

In a new paper released by Microsoft'due south research department, with the participation of researchers from Alibaba and Carnegie Mellon University, the Redmond-based software giant studied a blockchain-based incentive organisation to bolster anti-piracy campaigns.

Every bit the championship of the enquiry, "Argus: A Fully Transparent Incentive System for Anti-Piracy Campaigns," suggests, Microsoft's new system relies on the transparency aspect of blockchain technology. Congenital on the Ethereum blockchain, Argus aims to provide a trustless incentive mechanism while protecting data collected from the open up anonymous population of piracy reporters.

"We encounter this as a distributed organisation problem," the paper stated, "In the implementation, we overcome a prepare of unavoidable obstacles to ensure security despite total transparency."

Argus enables backtracing of pirated content to the source with a corresponding watermark algorithm, which is detailed in the paper. Too named "proof of leakage," each report of leaked content involves an information-hiding procedure. This manner, no ane but the informer tin can report the same watermarked copy without actually owning information technology.

The organisation likewise has incentive-reducing safeguards to prevent an informer from reporting the same leaked content over and over under dissimilar aliases. "With the security and practicality of Argus, we promise existent-world antipiracy campaigns will be truly effective past shifting to a fully transparent incentive machinery," the report stated.

Detailing the issue of Ethereum network fees, the paper explained that the team optimized several cryptographic operations "and so that the cost for piracy reporting is reduced to an equivalent cost of sending about 14 ETH-transfer transactions to run on the public Ethereum network, which would otherwise represent to thousands of transactions."

Related: Privacy-preserving ciphering on blockchains could forbid breaches

Tech companies worldwide have get increasingly concerned with protecting intellectual property and fighting digital piracy. As Cointelegraph previously reported, Tech Mahindra, the It subsidiary of Indian conglomerate Mahindra Group, recently launched a new blockchain-based digital contracts and rights platform on Hyperledger Fabric protocol for the media and amusement industry.