EduCopyRight-Chain: an educational resources copyright protection system utilizing permissionless blockchain and non-fungible tokens

Abstract

Blockchain technology and non-fungible tokens have gained significant attention and widespread adoption due to their unique characteristics and potential for innovation in numerous industries, including education. In recent years, there has been a significant increase in digital learning resources such as multimedia-rich learning content, audio content, and online course content. The advancement of these learning resources has introduced several copyright challenges, such as copyright ownership, fair use of resources, licensing agreements, open educational resources and Creative Commons licenses, digital piracy, and international considerations. Copyright infringement in educational learning resources poses a significant concern that impacts content creators hugely and raises concerns regarding the quality and reliability of the content. This work proposes a copyright protection framework named EduCopyRight-Chain for educational resources using the Ethereum blockchain and non-fungible tokens to overcome concerning challenges. This work also presents a sharding approach within the proposed framework to enhance scalability. Additionally, this work proposes wallet generation, network joining, educational resource tokenization, and a verification approach by utilizing blockchain and non-fungible tokens. The proposed framework uses a Proof-of-Authority consensus mechanism to validate transactions over the peer-to-peer network, and an inter-planetary file system is used for the decentralized storage of associated records. This framework uses Remix IDE, MetaMask wallet, and the Sepolia test network. We use the BlockSim simulation toolkit to conduct experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed framework in terms of throughput, latency, response time, and standard deviation. The proposed framework achieves an average throughput of 354.26 TPS, a latency of 62.2 milliseconds, a response time of 124.1 milliseconds, and a standard deviation of 144.2 milliseconds. This work also conducts a comparative analysis to assess security features and limitations between the proposed framework and related work. Our observation reveals that the proposed EduCopyRight-Chain framework has better features.