Hebo System: Trusted Copyright Authorization in Computer Networks

The DRM (Digital Rights Management) systems protect owners’ copyrights by controlling consumers’ access to digital works. However, they fail to provide authorization evidence if customers use digital works on other platforms outside the DRM systems. There is no such evidence that can trustworthily be disseminated in computer networks, which results in many copyright lawsuits. To address the problem, we propose the Copyrights Authorization Model (CAM) and the Hebo system to ensure the consensus on copyright authorization in computer networks. The CAM proves that participants agree on copyright authorizations if they are traceable, integrated, and non-repudiated. Based on the CAM, we design the ledger of trusted authorization forest that keeps the three properties and independent zones that maintain the ledger. The Hebo system is composed of these zones. It can provide authorization evidence for consumers to avoid copyright disputes. Besides, it has the advantages of a beneficial locality. The TPS (transactions per second) can increase with the number of independent zones, nodes can flexibly choose ledgers according to their capability, the system reduces redundant storage, and zones allow asynchrony. Finally, we evaluate the system on five different platforms, and the average time costs of operations are less than 60 milliseconds. The TPS of a single node depends on the configuration of the hardware, which is an average of 138, 19, 24, 21, and 98 in Server, MacBook, J-Nano, Pi4B, and J-TX2, respectively.