A blockchain based buyer-seller watermark protocol with trustless third party

Background: With the development and innovation of digital information technologies and new-generation Internet information platforms, new types of information exchange methods have been spawned. It has broken the restriction of the traditional internet boundary, and integrated all round connections between people and objects. Methods: Based on the above progresses, digital multimedia contents distributed or published much more convenient on the internet than before and most of them without any copyright protection. The dishonest owner can easily copy and distribute digital multimedia content without reducing any per-ceptual quality. According to the relative concerns, watermark protocol networks play a very im-portant role in the usage tracking and copyrights infringement authentication, etc. However, most of the watermark protocols always require a “fully trusted third party”, which has a potential risk to suffer conspiracy attack. Results: Therefore, in this paper, we focus on designing a watermark protocol with trustless third party via blockchain for protecting copyrights of owners that they want to publish or distribute on the internet. The proposed watermark protocol includes three sub-protocols which covers the nego-tiation process, transaction process and identification processes. Conclusion: In addition, this paper also provides a fully detail analysis that describes the benefits and weaknesses of current solution.