Smart Contract for Digital Garment Design using Blockchain and Digital Right Management

Abstract

Background: In the current advancement of communication, anyone can create digital content. Emerging digital marketplaces provides an environment to share digital data with customers who are interested in content, from other digital sources. Digital marketplaces provide a location for both providers and consumers to connect to meet the increased demand. All of this leads to challenges in content protection, copyright protection, contract creation and work trading. Objectives: To address these issues, this scheme suggests a blockchain based approach for managing digital rights to garment design works. This system uses the blockchain, digital copyright management techniques and off-chain computation for garment design work. The visibility of design effects, the secrecy of design details and compliance with applicable regulations are all considered. The data delivery is also assured with the help of the proof-of-delivery concept. Methods: The proposed system has three steps. They are (i) Creating digital copyright documents using key generation and verification of digital signature (ii) Smart contract creation (iii) Certificate generation for confirmed smart contracts. A Smart contract is defined as computerized transaction protocols that execute the terms of a contract. Findings: Smart contracts are created between the designer and customer using Ethereum which is a blockchain based software platform. The interplanetary file system is used to store digital documents. Ethereum blockchain is used to create the smart contract digitally. Ethereum smart contract provides unchangeable, transparent, tamper-proof logs, traceability and responsibility. Finally, E-certificate is generated by the designer for the confirmed contracts and it is uploaded into the IPFS. Novelty and applications: The trusted, decentralized and proof of delivery frameworks are included for digital design work with the key features of IPFS, blockchain and Ethereum smart contract. The proposed work is also compared with the existing works based on several criteria such as blockchain, IPFS, PoD, etc. Keywords: Blockchain; Design work; Copyright Protection; Digital Signature; Ethereum