Enabling efficient verification in a DApp: The case of copyright management

The Interested Party Information (IPI) system uniquely identifies the rights holders worldwide, making it possible to know for each subject and at any time which rights are protected, by whom and for which territories. Currently, this service is provided in a centralized way but, in 2021, Italian Society of Authors and Editors (SIAE) deployed a blockchain-based solution to completely decentralize this database to a) provide greater guarantees to the rights holders as well as to end users and b) make a first tangible step in the path towards an all in-chain solution decentralizing a relevant component of the current architecture. Such solution relied on early versions of Algorand smart contracts, delegating in many practical scenarios, some off-chain verification to trusted third parties. In the meanwhile, the Algorand technology developed new tools, allowing us to design new techniques to reduce some of the trust assumptions of the original solution and enhance at the same time its efficiency. In this paper, we present the evolution of the solutions we designed to issue new on-chain non-conflicting rights representations, namely representations that are consistent with the ones already available on-chain. Our solution relies on smart contracts that have been implemented to run our experiments to prove a) the feasibility of the proposed approach, b) the scalability of the proposed solutions and c) the sustainability in terms of costs.