Microsoft Team Up With Ernst & Young To Launch Blockchain-Based DRM for Xbox

Global tech Juggernaut Microsoft and multinational financial services firm Ernst & Young joined forces to launch a new blockchain initiative that will bring digital rights and royalties management onto a distributed ledger network.

The new platform will deploy within the Microsoft Xbox gaming ecosystem and across game publisher partners, disrupting a significant portion of the gaming industry.

The new blockchain solution, created in tandem between Microsoft and EY, can be used in any industry in which intellectual property or assets are licensed.

The speed Microsoft is able to distribute digital content or intellectual property to consumers may be extremely rapid, with most users experiencing instant order fulfillment for digital purchases, but the technology driving software delivery is far from efficient.

The new solution devised by Microsoft and EY proposes a distributed ledger based platform that allows market participants to create and agree on business terms in a peer-to-peer manner, with all agreements executed via smart contracts on the blockchain.

"The scale, complexity, and volume of digital rights and royalties transactions makes this a perfect application for blockchains. A blockchain can handle the unique nature of each contract between digital rights owners and licensors can be handled in a scalable, efficient manner."

Microsoft isn't the only content distributor considering blockchain as a solution to the issue of digital rights management.

Sony filed a patent in April 2016 for a blockchain-powered digital rights DRM that leverages the immutable nature of distributed ledger networks to ensure that only users who purchased content can view it.

In addition to working with Microsoft to optimize the digital rights and royalties ecosystem, Ernst & Young is also working with IBM alongside industry giants such as Accenture, Cloudsoft, and JPMorgan Chase to bring real-world assets onto the blockchain with distributed ledger based supply chain solutions via the Hyperledger project.

"The distributed ledger can house the access rights to content of an individual, device or any other identifiable measure. This would be instant, or near instant, as access rights received and recorded in the blockchain will propagate throughout the network immediately".