Creation Blockchain

Assigned Computer Science Games Engineering eXtended Artifical Intelligence Bachelor Master Project Thesis Games Research Lab

task:

Blockchain technologies have been invented to provide secure, temper-proof logs of important transactions. In this thesis / project, you design a novel way to secure creators’ intellectual property by designing and implementing a system that documents the creation processes themselves. In particular, a user connects to a process documentation authority server (PDA) and transmits the steps of his/her production process. The PDA adds timestamps to the received information and weaves them into a securely encoded blockchain that can be read and verified but not altered. Hence, the PDA generates, signs, and returns the transaction blocks to the connected user. The creative software – whether it’s a modelling or programming software – has to act as a process documentation client (PDC) and support the PDA’s API, i.e. be able to document individual production steps in the necessary format, to send the respective dscriptions to the PDA, and to receive and maintain the returned blocks. In addition, it needs to be able to read and interpret the generated blockchain to arrive at the created artefact.

In this way, the effectiveness, the origin, and the time of the productive process are documented. Of course, there are numerous additional concerns one might want to address in order to make the PDA-PDC tandem widely applicable and attractive for proving one’s authorship. But the simplicity of this concept already bears some nice feats such as the long-term independence of the PDA – it’s credentials and public keys need to be known to verify a chain generated centuries ago, nothing more. Now, in addition to the actual artefacts, even the creation process can be copied – but the timestamps from a high-credit authority allow to clearly retrace the artefacts’ origins.

As part of this thesis / project, you would develop the system based on preceding blockchain / secure logging technologies. This would entail the server / client-setup, including the underlying API and the concrete communication protocoll. For a first proof-of-concept, I suggest an implementation for the 3D modelling and animation software Blender. In this context, minimal deviations from typcial workflows and great robustness would be apt success metrics.

Literature

• Jagwani, P., Singh, V. B., Agrawal, N., & Tripathi, A. P. (2023). Blockchain technology and software engineering practices: A systematic review of literature using topic modelling approach. International Journal of System Assurance Engineering and Management, 14(Suppl 1), 1-17.
• Handke, C. (2016). Intellectual property in creative industries: The economic perspective. Forthcoming in: Waelde, C. & Brown, A.(eds.). Research Handbook on Intellectual Property and Creative Industries. Cheltenham: Elgar.
• Conlan, C. (2017). The blender python API: Precision 3D modeling and add-on development. Apress.
• Hristov, G., & Kinaneva, D. (2021, June). A Workflow for Developing Game Assets for Video Games. In 2021 3rd International Congress on Human-Computer Interaction, Optimization and Robotic Applications (HORA) (pp. 1-5). IEEE.

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