Microsoft's Latest Anti-Piracy Weapon Is Ethereum

The technology behemoth behind the Windows operating system plans to use the Ethereum ETH/USD blockchain in its fight against digital piracy.

What Happened: In a recent white paper released by Microsoft Corporation MSFT, the firm describes an incentive system to bolster anti-piracy campaigns based on Ethereum called Argus.

The document describes a tool leveraging the blockchain to provide a trustless system that allows piracy reporters to remain anonymous while still operating in a transparent system.

The system was developed with the participation of researchers from Alibaba and Carnegie Mellon University and purportedly overcomes "a set of unavoidable obstacles to ensure security despite full transparency.”

Argus would enable the backtracing of pirated content to the source, thanks to a corresponding watermark algorithm.

Each report filed to Argus would involve an information-hiding procedure that allows only the informer to report the same watermarked copy without owning it.

The report hopes that with this tool, "real-world antipiracy campaigns will be truly effective by shifting to a fully transparent incentive mechanism."

Read also: Why Ethereum Miners Are Making A Million Dollar Bet Against Proof-of-Stake

Ethereum's famous high transaction fees are not much of a problem to Argus, thanks to cryptographic operations making it "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 correspond to thousands of transactions.”

Price Action: According to CoinMarketCap data, Ethereum is up 2.31% on the day and trading at $3,229.