BC-DERCP: Blockchain-based copyright protection mechanism for digital educational resources

With the rapid development of information technology, various online education platforms support the sharing of digital educational resources. Because digital educational resources are simple to duplicate and disseminate quickly, there exists copyright infringement, which threatens the interests of copyright owners. In addition, the existing digital education resource copyright protection solutions have the problems of privacy disclosure of copyright owners, lack of multidimensional copyright evidence, lack of credible infringement tracking method, resulting in the lack of high-quality resources, lack of creative enthusiasm, and increasing infringement phenomenon. To solve the above problems, we propose a blockchain-based digital education resource copyright protection mechanism BC-DERCP. Firstly, we propose a digital educational resources secure storage method, which can store encrypted user privacy information and multi-dimensional resource copyright information in the blockchain, ensuring the originality of resources, and protecting the privacy and digital copyright of copyright holders. Secondly, we propose a digital educational resources collaborative verification method, which uses consortium Blockchain nodes to coordinate the supervision of copyright infringement and provide strong evidence for rights protection. Finally, a novel blockchain-based digital education resource copyright protection platform is realized, and we conduct multi-dimensional experiments on the performance of the system and use both quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate learners’ acceptance of the system. The experimental results show that the system is better than the existing digital education resource copyright protection system. The participants hold that the proposed system has good performance, which can ensure copyright security and improve the initiative of learners to create resources.