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Open Access

A Blockchain-Based Copyright Management Scheme for Open-Source Software and Hardware Designs

School of Information Science and Technology, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China
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Abstract

Plagiarism in software code and hardware design threatens the open-source movement and the software and hardware industries. It is essential to differentiate between the unethical act of plagiarism and the legitimate use of open-source resources. Existing copyright protection measures, such as license design, inadequately address copyright ownership and protection issues. Furthermore, they fail to detect plagiarism methods for open-source hardware projects, such as circuit location modification. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a blockchain-based copyright management scheme, which introduces a general originality detection model based on community detection, extracting adjustable granularity digests from code and design files. These digests are stored on a peer-to-peer blockchain, enabling nodes to verify the originality via smart contracts. Additionally, the scheme improves the storage structure, protecting the rights of authors and contributors. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and runtime efficiency of the proposed model in extracting digests for blockchain storage while maintaining verification accuracy. The scheme offers enhanced generality, practical performance, and suitability for distributed development and maintenance, with considerable implications for evidence gathering, fostering innovation and integrity.

Keywords

blockchaincopyright managementopen-source software and hardwareoriginality detection

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Tsinghua Science and Technology
Volume 30 Issue 3,
June 2025
Pages 1157-1173
DOI: 10.26599/TST.2023.9010112
Cite this article:
Jin Y, Ling L. A Blockchain-Based Copyright Management Scheme for Open-Source Software and Hardware Designs. Tsinghua Science and Technology, 2025, 30(3): 1157-1173. https://doi.org/10.26599/TST.2023.9010112

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Received: 18 July 2023
Revised: 27 September 2023
Accepted: 28 September 2023
Published: 08 July 2024
© The Author(s) 2025.

The articles published in this open access journal are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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