  Anti-piracy is fundamentally a procedure that relies on collecting data from
the open anonymous population, so how to incentivize credible reporting is a
question at the center of the problem. Industrial alliances and companies are
running anti-piracy incentive campaigns, but their effectiveness is publicly
questioned due to the lack of transparency. We believe that full transparency
of a campaign is necessary to truly incentivize people. It means that every
role, e.g., content owner, licensee of the content, or every person in the open
population, can understand the mechanism and be assured about its execution
without trusting any single role.
  We see this as a distributed system problem. In this paper, we present Argus,
a fully transparent incentive system for anti-piracy campaigns. The groundwork
of Argus is to formulate the objectives for fully transparent incentive
mechanisms, which securely and comprehensively consolidate the different
interests of all roles. These objectives form the core of the Argus design,
highlighted by our innovations about a Sybil-proof incentive function, a
commit-and-reveal scheme, and an oblivious transfer scheme. In the
implementation, we overcome a set of unavoidable obstacles to ensure security
despite full transparency. Moreover, we effectively optimize several
cryptographic operations so that the cost for a piracy reporting is reduced to
an equivalent cost of sending about 14 ETH-transfer transactions to run on the
public Ethereum network, which would otherwise correspond to thousands of
transactions. With the security and practicality of Argus, we hope real-world
anti-piracy campaigns will be truly effective by shifting to a fully
transparent incentive mechanism.
