Design of a blockchain-based framework for digital copyright protection and tamper prevention

Abstract

The rapid growth of digital content has intensified copyright infringement and tampering risks, revealing structural limitations of centralized digital rights management (DRM) systems such as watermarking and database-driven approaches. These systems suffer from single points of failure, high operational costs, and limited transparency. To address these issues, this paper proposes a blockchain- and IPFS-based copyright protection framework that integrates Ethereum smart contracts with decentralized storage in a hybrid on-chain/off-chain architecture. The system automates copyright registration, integrity verification, ownership transfer, and tamper detection using SHA-256 hashing and smart contract execution, while IPFS enables content-addressable and deduplicated storage. Unlike prior blockchain–IPFS studies that primarily present conceptual architectures or partial workflows, this work emphasizes a fully automated end-to-end system with continuous tamper monitoring and statistically validated evaluation. Experimental results obtained on the Ethereum testnet, using a centralized DRM system as a baseline, demonstrate 99.2% tamper detection accuracy, a 1.7× improvement in processing speed, and a 36% reduction in storage cost. These results indicate that the proposed framework provides a technically reliable and scalable approach to decentralized copyright management.