


In the implementation, we overcome a set of unavoidable obstacles to ensure security despite full transparency. 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. 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. In this paper, we present Argus, a fully transparent incentive system for anti-piracy campaigns. We see this as a distributed system problem. 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 believe that full transparency of a campaign is necessary to truly incentivize people. Industrial alliances and companies are running anti-piracy incentive campaigns, but their effectiveness is publicly questioned due to the lack of transparency. 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.
