A Decentralized Approach to Video Copyright Protection Using Private Blockchain and Perceptual Hashing

The growing popularity of video content sharing on the Internet has raised concerns about copyright violations, piracy, and ownership disputes. Traditional centralized methods for handling copyright face transparency issues, susceptibility to manipulation, and reliance on trusted third parties. Therefore, this study presents a decentralized video copyright protection system based on Hyperledger Fabric, smart contracts, and perceptual hashing. Firstly, the frames from the videos are extracted, and perceptual fingerprints are created using the average hash (aHash), difference hash (dHash), perceptual hash (pHash), and wavelet hash (wHash) algorithms. Hashes and ownership information are stored on the blockchain, while multimedia assets are kept outside the ledger. Copyright checks are performed using frame-level similarity comparisons based on the Hamming distance. The proposed framework was tested across various temporal, spatial, and compressive manipulations, including frame insertion, deletion, cropping, resizing, rotation, filtering, and transcoding. The experiments showed high robustness to such changes while simultaneously detecting unauthorized modifications. Therefore, this technology can provide a practical solution to copyright issues using a decentralized blockchain framework.