Sony Files Patent For Digital Rights Storage On A Blockchain

Sony, one of the leading tech firms and a Japanese giant, recently filed for a patent to store the users’ digital rights data on the blockchain. This patent stands to disrupt another industry.

Sony’s patent application was published by the US Patent & Trademark Office on April 26th this year. It even made its way to the top of the queue because of the popularity of the company. The Tokyo-based Sony Corp. is currently behind great innovation as the Walkman and virtual reality (VR) headset PlayStation VR are reinvented.

However, it seems that the company’s appetite for blockchain is big – as they set their sights on distributed ledger technology and are looking to manage and store users’ digital entitlement data on the blockchain.

Sony has broken down the possible implementations of the DRM on the blockchain. They would look like this, according to the patent application:

• Sony receives a public-key fueled enrollment request
• Verification process to make sure the user has the private key to match the public key
• A user ID is generated via the public key
• “generating and delivering the rights blockchain having a genesis block including the user identifier to the use,”

There is even an image of the blockchain fueled DRM system and its functions.

Sony explained the pain point in the DRM process that is best solved by the blockchain technology – and it is centered around the disruption of another market. In a nutshell, the way that businesses use DRM technology right now is by engaging a third-party vendor for a digital rights locker or other data storage methods.

As Sony warns:

“However, these conventional solutions may not be very reliable and rely on one unique point of failure. If the rights locker provider or system goes out of business or otherwise fails, the user loses all the acquired content.”

The company goes to explain how the current system stores a user’s content rights on a license that is applicable to a single user or a specified platform. The blockchain-fueled DRM would remove the need for third-party services and create a host of possibilities – giving Sony and its customers more control over their data.