IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2020 - 75

One proposal made by Steve Kenny and Larry Korba
actually used this phenomenon to the advantage of one
jurisdiction [23]. In their proposal, a digital rights management system would be used to ensure that personal data
subject to the European Union's Data Protection Directive
95/46/EC was processed according to that directive, even
if the processing was done by service providers located
outside the European Union. One can at least in principle
imagine jurisdiction-aware smart contract systems that
similarly ensured contracts were executed according the
law under which they were made, though it is not immediately obvious if or how these would implemented.

Applying Digital Rights Management
History to Smart Contracts
Though the underlying technologies are quite different,
smart contracts bear a number of similarities to digital
rights management. Proponents of both technologies
promise(d) agreements that could be enforced efficiently and automatically by computer, without any possibility of one party reneging, and eliminating the need for
long and expensive litigation.
Considering the difficulties faced by digital rights management illustrates some of the risks faced by smart contracts. Agreements made under certain market conditions
may not truly reflect the interests of both parties. Computer code may not capture all of the intricacies that exist in
desirable agreements. Few people understand the languages in which smart contracts are written, limiting their
ability to understand what they've supposedly agreed to.
The DAO shows that even those who do understand smart
contract languages can make errors that lead to the efficient and automatic carrying out of disasters.
Some ideas from the time of digital rights management also may be applicable to smart contracts. Could
smart contracts implement readily-understandable templates akin to Creative Commons licenses, for example,
adequate for certain specialized applications? Could or
should there be an accessible way of annulling a bad
contract, akin to a circumvention device for a digital
rights management system? Is a standardization effort
required to avoid a mess of non-interworking blockchains (or, could we see a mess of non-interworking
"standards," as in digital rights management)? But it is
also worth noting that some problems of digital rights
management - such as fair use - remain unsolved.
Of course there are also significant differences
between digital rights management and smart contracts, most notably in the applications for which they
have proposed. These may avoid the difficulties faced in
implementing copyright law, or they may bring their own
difficulties different from those encountered in digital
rights management. The specifics of each application
are left as future work.
MARCH 2020

∕

Author Information
Nicholas Paul Sheppard was with the Singapore Institute
of Technology, Singapore. He is now with the School of
Computer, Data and Mathematical Sciences at Western
Sydney University, Australia. Email: nicholas.sheppard@
ieee.org.

References
[1] A. Norta, "Designing a smart-contract application layer for transacting decentralized autonomous organizations," in Proc. Int. Conf.
Advances in Computing and Data Sciences (New Delhi, India), 2016.
[2] "What is Ethereum?," [Online]. Available: http://etherscripter.com/
what_is_ethereum.html. [Accessed 22 January 2018].
[3] N. Szabo, "Formalizing and securing relationships on public networks," First Monday, vol. 2, no. 9, 1997.
[4] M. Stefik, "Letting loose the light: Igniting commerce in electronic
publication," in Internet Dreams. 1996, pp. 219-253.
[5] B. R. Caraway, "Survey of file-sharing culture," Int. J. Communication, vol. 6, pp. 564-584, 2012.
[6] Ofcom, "Online Copyright Infringement Tracker Benchmark Study
Q3 2012," 2012.
[7] L. Lessig, CODE: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, New York, NY:
Basic, 1999.
[8] K. Wiens and G. Gordon-Byrne, "The fight to fix it," IEEE Spectrum,
vol. 54, no. 11, pp. 24-29, 2017.
[9] F. Kamperman, "Digital rights management interoperability," in
Security, Privacy, and Trust in Modern Data Management. Berlin,
Germany: Springer, 2007, pp. 317-331.
[10] G. Doërr and T. Kalker, "Design rules for interoperable domains:
controlling content dilution and content sharing," in Proc. ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management (Alexandria, VA), 2008.
[11] S. Katzenbeisser, K. Kursawe and J. Talstra, "Graceful Infringement
Reactions in DRM Systems," in Proc. ACM Workshop on Digital Rights
Management (Alexandria, VA), 2006.
[12] N. Jondet and J. Winn, "A new deal for end users? Lessons from a
French innovation," William & Mary Law Rev., vol. 15, pp. 547-576,
2009.
[13] D. L. Burk and J. E. Cohen, "Fair use infrastructure for copyright
management systems," Harvard J. Law and Technology, vol. 15, pp.
41-83, 2001.
[14] T. K. Armstrong, "Fair circumvention," Brooklyn Law Rev., vol. 7,
no. 1, pp. 1-50, 2008.
[15] P. Samuelson and J. Schultz, "Should copyright owners have to give
notice of their use of technical protection measures?," J. Telecommunications and High Technology Law, vol. 6, pp. 41-76, 2007.
[16] T. Aste, P. Tasca and T. Di Matteo, "Blockchain technologies: The
foreseeable impact on society and industry," IEEE Computer, vol. 50,
no. 9, pp. 18-28, 2017.
[17] K. E. C. Levy, "Book-smart, not street-smart: Blockchain-based
smart contracts and the social workings of law," Engaging Science,
Technology, and Society, vol. 3, 2017.
[18] R. Lewis, J. W. McPartland and R. Ranjan, "Blockchain and financial
market innovation," Economic Perspectives, vol. 41, no. 7, 2017.
[19] M. Mettler, "Blockchain technology in healthcare: The revolution
starts here," in 2016 IEEE 18th Int. Conf. e-Health Networking,
Applications and Services (Healthcom). (Munich, Germany), 2016.
[20] S. Underwood, "Blockchain beyond Bitcoin," Commun. ACM, vol.
59, no. 11, pp. 15-17, 2016.
[21] C. D. Clack, V. A. Bakshi and L. Braine, "Smart contract templates:
Foundations, design landscape and research directions," arXiv.org,
Aug. 2016.
[22] C. K. Frantz and M. Nowostawski, "From institutions to code: Towards
automated generation of smart contracts," in Proc. IEEE 1st Workshop on
Foundations and Applications of Self-* Systems, 2016.
[23] S. Kenny and L. Korba, "Applying digital rights management systems to privacy rights management," Computers & Security, vol. 21,
no. 7, pp. 648-664, 2002.

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

http://etherscripter.com/what_is_ethereum.html http://etherscripter.com/what_is_ethereum.html http://www.arXiv.org

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2020