Blockchain-Based Framework for Protecting Author Royalty of Digital Assets

摘要

To date, there is a considerable lack of transparency in the sales of digital assets between the author and providers of the digital assets, which typically leads to denying the authors from receiving their fair share of royalty. This paper proposes a blockchain-based framework and solution for online publishing and sale of digital assets. The solution is based on utilizing smart contracts of Ethereum blockchain to govern the sales of e-books and ensure that the payment is dispersed in cryptocurrency as agreed among the publisher(s) and the author. Our solution handles cases related to incentives for both publishers and customers to ensure integral delivery of the digital books, failure of downloads, and refunds. We provide the full code of the Ethereum smart contract, and we also performed security vulnerability analysis to ascertain that our smart contract is bug free and secure against known attacks and vulnerabilities.