philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Argus: A Fully Transparent Incentive System for Anti-Piracy Campaigns

IX. CONCLUSIONS

Anti-piracy is fundamentally a procedure that relies on collecting data from the open anonymous population, so how to incentivize credible reports is a question at the center of the problem. Academic researchers and real-world companies have come up with various incentive mecha- nisms. However, without explicitly prescribing the interests of different roles and the objectives of an anti-piracy system, designing such a mechanism has been more of a “creative art” than a systematic and disciplined exploration. Currently, there is no good framework to evaluate these designs and actual systems.

The most essential value of our work is not the Argus system itself, but the approach leading to its design and im- plementation. We first state clearly the interests of different roles and the goal of full transparency without trusting any role. Once these are stated, all the design requirements nat- urally surface, such as Sybil-proofness, information-hiding submission, resistance to infringer’s repudiation, etc; once these design requirements are clear, we are able to deduce, rather than invent, the general form of valid solutions; the deduced general form then boils down to a set of unavoidable technical obstacles, which we overcome by adapting cryptographic schemes, building contract code and optimizing performance.

See the full paper here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2021/08/Argus_SRDS_Camera.pdf?ck_subscriber_id=958930034&utm_source=convertkit&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Microsoft+wants+to+use+Ethereum+blockchain+to+fight+piracy%20-%206411909