Reliable, Fair and Decentralized Marketplace for Content Sharing Using Blockchain
This addresses fairness and reliability issues for content creators and consumers in digital media sharing, though it is incremental as it applies existing blockchain and storage technologies to this domain.
The paper tackles the lack of transparency and fairness in centralized content sharing platforms by developing a decentralized marketplace using blockchain and distributed storage, demonstrating practical scalability with low overheads.
Content sharing platforms such as Youtube and Vimeo have promoted pay per view models for artists to monetize their content. Yet, artists remain at the mercy of centralized platforms that control content listing and advertisement, with little transparency and fairness in terms of number of views or revenue. On the other hand, consumers are distanced from the publishers and cannot authenticate originality of the content. In this paper, we develop a reliable and fair platform for content sharing without a central facilitator. The platform is built as a decentralized data storage layer to store and share content in a fault-tolerant manner, where the peers also participate in a blockchain network. The blockchain is used to manage content listings and as an auditable and fair marketplace transaction processor that automatically pays out the content creators and the storage facilitators using smart contracts. We demonstrate the system with the blockchain layer built on Hyperledger Fabric and the data layer built on Tahoe-LAFS,and show that our design is practical and scalable with low overheads.