Mediachain provides a blockchain tool to protect the interests of network creators

Baozou Review : The startup Mediachain has established a decentralized media library similar to blockchain, combined with content identification technology, so that everyone can use its tools to register, verify and track creative works on the network. This can effectively protect the original creators of the works, while allowing the original creators to control the entire publicity process, realize the capitalization of the works, and better understand the audience's preferences and feedback. The tools developed by Mediachain are very effective in combating piracy. It has currently raised $1.5 million through venture capital companies. I believe it will soon become a reality. Let us wait and see.

Translation: Nicole

"Collective" on the Internet is the highest form of flattery, and not everyone likes it.

In the digital age, content (in all its forms) has become increasingly commoditized and monetized, but near-instantaneous global distribution and the ability to replicate it endlessly make it easier to separate the original creator from the work.

Brooklyn-based Mediachain wants to change that.

Through a blockchain-like decentralized media library combined with content identification technology, everyone can use Mediachain application tools to register, verify and track creative works in the network.

Denis Nazarov

Denis Nazarov, co-founder of Mediachain, said:

“Mediachain is a global media library that uses content recognition technology similar to Shazam or Google Image Search, inspired by the Bitcoin blockchain.”

App developers can use content metadata to automate attribution, preserve content movement history, and analyze how content is used.

Here is what the company has to say about its work verification service in its blog post.

Imagine being able to contact the creator of a GIF you see, learn where the image came from, or automatically reward a musician when you press play. Developers can use this tool to tap into even more information.

The company says the Mediachain codebase already has more than 2 million images and metadata records, including from sources such as the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), Getty Images, the Digital Public Library of America, and the European Digital Library.

Jesse Walden

Jesse Walden, another co-founder of the company, said:

“What if all information on the Internet is shared? Any media using Mediachain can verify the author of the picture and the story behind it.”

Basically, the goal is to use this content more efficiently, Walden said:

“Today’s images go viral and are seen by millions of people, but the creator of the work may never be rewarded accordingly.”

Attribution is a foreign word to the Internet, and misattribution or plagiarism often occurs.

Photographers who have photos of David Bowie often use them without authorization, even some legitimate companies do this, and we should strongly condemn such behavior.

— Matthew Perpetua (@perpetua) January 12, 2016

Breaking news: Twitter is cracking down on plagiarized blog posts and will @ the original author when citing them.

— Plagiarism Is Bad (@PlagiarismBad) July 25, 2015

What's funny to me is not the plagiarized joke @fatjew posted, but the way it was posted.

— Michael Ian Black (@michaelianblack) August 16, 2015

Walden said:

"It is useless to keep it rare, which is completely different from controlling and creating rarity."

This is something that copyright agencies currently want to resolve but have not yet resolved.

Walden and Nazarov both come from a time when everything was free to share. Napster, BitTorrent, and Tumblr were all free platforms for sharing files.

While these platforms are conducive to innovation, the two Mediachain co-founders I interviewed realized that creators have no control over their work and cannot interact with their audiences.

It is one thing for the creator of a work to voluntarily give up control over the audience, and it is another thing for the creator of the work to not know who likes his work.

The likes of Andreessen, Union Square, Digital Currency Group, LDV Capital, Alexis Ohanian, William Mougayar, Kanyi Maqubela, David Lee, Mathieu Drouin, and Brian Message all agree with the founders’ idea.

He said:

"The economy on the Internet is the attention economy, and everyone is a creator. You post content on Instagram and Tumblr, and you get likes and followers. So you can monetize your work by using these platforms, and you can monetize your work only by proving that you own it."

Ownership of Mediachain comes from publishing content on the system and creating a Mediachain node. Developers register content with the Mediachain protocol. When more developers log in, they can spread Mediachain datasets through different platforms.

For Nazarov and Walden, the question of attribution is more than academic. Before getting into programming, Nazarov was a fine-art photographer by training, while Walden once helped start a management company that managed sound engineers like Solange Knowles.

Walden said:

“The long-term vision is that if creators can get their work discovered, then they can own the entire promotional process and ultimately monetize their work in ways that they couldn’t before.”

He said:

“We live in a free media market.”

The founder of Mediachain believes that this model should be changed as soon as possible, and that such rights should be given to the creators of the works rather than to the platforms.