Distributed Ledger Tech for Public Good — Part 2
In Part 1, I briefly covered what’s DLT and its use case for education certificates.
In this post, I will touch on the use case for consortium-based DLT and conclude with some thoughts on this technology.
Copyright Registry on Consortium DLT
Copyright infringement can happen because sometimes it is difficult to find the contact information of the author of creative work or is challenging to obtain a suitable licence to use. The traditional approach is to have a trusted authority such as IPOS, running the copyright registry in a central database.
There’s no better time to dream bigger, beyond our shores. 🦁🏖️
Together with IPOS, we envisioned a copyright registry on DLT that can be collectively run by IP Offices across the world. This will expand copyright protection of creative work across borders and can enable a global marketplace, where it’s easier for authors to collaborate and collect royalties for their creative work across countries.
So we developed a copyright registry that allows an author to create a unique fingerprint of her/his digital work as a hash and save this hash in the DLT, together with creation’s timestamp and content’s meta-data. This unique fingerprint can then serve as proof in a copyright infringement dispute.
For this PoC, we experimented with several DLTs that are suited to run in a permissioned and consortium environment, such as Parity and Swirlds.
Unlike the PoC on academic credential, this use case is pretty self-explanatory because short of having a central body who commands the trust of all IP offices, DLT is the next best alternative.
DLT is an institutional technology — not just a shared database.
Here’s how it works — implemented in Hashgraph as well as Parity🏂
Final thoughts on DLT
DLT is a very promising technology, albeit with a very small problem-solution space. So before you get all excited and add to the already nonsensical blockchain hype, here are some compulsory readings to temper your expectations.
“Curiosity is not a sin…. But we should exercise caution with our curiosity.” — Dumbledore
There are three types of DLT — private, consortium and public.
- If you can use private DLT, chances are you can also use a traditional database. So why bother with DLT when you can use a traditional relational database which is battle-tested for decades, able to process thousands of transactions per second and well-supported by tech specialists. Unless for blockchain hype, ICO craze or corporate KPI, no? 😉
- Consortium-based DLT is useful for organizational collaboration, such as inter-bank payment and settlements, and copyright registry across countries when no single entity governs all others. Warning: If a 3rd-party service provider operates all the nodes in your consortium-based DLT, you are basically shifting trust from a central database to a new intermediary. So unless this new middleman can provide the service at a fraction of the cost, this doesn’t make much sense. 🤷♂️
- And of these three, public DLT makes the most sense because…
The biggest benefit of DLT comes from its unique ability to distribute trust across multiple writers which is the basis of OpenCerts. This dis-intermediates dumb notary.
Dumb because some functions of a notary are smart, such as interpreting patents — until AI comes along so let’s save that story for another day. 😉
Our work on OpenCerts lends itself well to many industries that require notary services:
- Are not time-sensitive and therefore allows batching to overcome the performance challenges and transaction costs of Ethereum.
- Allow user to disclose — confidential — information selectively.
- Have a dumb notary that is expensive or inconvenient to upkeep — not disruption for disruption’s sake.
- And preferably use across borders.
Examples are health records, identity, bill of lading, contracts, licenses and other legal documents. E.g. deed poll, driving licenses, business licenses, etc…
Coupled with open-standards and open source, DLT is a powerful technology for governments to collaborate across borders, especially in areas of trade, finance, education and identity — of all, I personally find Decentralized Identity Foundation most interesting.
And here’s a parting question — How can polygamy be detected or enforced across countries without DLT? 😉
We are looking for solid software engineers who are passionate about tech and want to help us build awesome digital products for Singapore! 🇸🇬🏆
Reach me at steven_koh@tech.gov.sg (ゝ‿ ・)
For more DLT adventure, follow us and join our DLT Singapore meetup! 😉
Cheers! 🍻
