Mediachain is using blockchain to build a global intellectual property database

One of the biggest untapped use cases for blockchain technology is in the media sector, a catch-all sector that attracts many creative professionals and where traditional business models have been upended by lightning-fast digital file replication.

Across sectors, the problem is clear: writers, photographers, and musicians lack the ability to prove and protect ownership of their work and ideas, making monetization difficult in the digital environment.

Faced with this challenge, blockchain technology, which has the ability to provide verification, identity recognition and micropayments, has emerged as a potential solution.

Mediachain is one of the innovative and unique projects in this field. It is a newly launched metadata protocol that allows digital creators to attach information to their creations, add a timestamp to the data and send it to the Bitcoin blockchain, which is then stored on the InterPublic File System (IPFS), a distributed file system that integrates various features of blockchain technology.

For Jesse Walden and Denis Nazarov, co-founders of Mine, the startup behind the Mediachain project, entrepreneurial innovators approaching the space are often trying to unravel how the internet is changing media business models, rather than helping those affected work more effectively within the constraints of this new reality.

The Mediachain project has begun focusing its work on image data and attributes, leveraging machine learning capabilities and blockchain technology to provide services that allow users to not only attach identity authentication information to files, but also search for creators by querying files.

In its early days, the project’s focus was on imagery, as Nazarov told CoinDesk:

“Images are the most easily shareable type of media on the internet, through dragging and dropping, copying and pasting. Images can go viral, but their creators and content owners rarely benefit from them. We are very optimistic about Mediachain’s role as a global intellectual property database for images.”

When combining Mediachain with services like Instagram, Nazarov and Walden envision a future where someone who wants to repost a photo can simply look up the historical information in Mediachain’s database.

In this way, they see their efforts as helping to preserve identities, even if, as they themselves say, enforcing intellectual property rights and commercializing this content is simply "an impossible problem."

Over a long enough timeline, such a reliable metadata database could enable a new platform, Walden and Nazarov claim, that would be like a new generation of Spotify or Netflix, a platform that makes it easy to identify information about creative works.
“Mediachain’s goal is to do the disaggregated transactions for identity and issuance,” Walden said. “Our platform is the identity layer on top of which the issuance platform can be built.”

Lessons from the Past

Walden and Nazarov also identified what they believe is a tangible pushback against the wider adoption of the Mediachain platform: regulations requiring public institutions to provide open data on images used in galleries, libraries and archives.

“Part of their open licensing is to provide metadata about their work that is publicly licensed,” Nazarov said. “The Met probably has its own metadata platform, and it probably has an API, and there are a lot of fascinating projects being built on top of that.”

He specifically cited the New York Public Library’s work mapping historical images to make them available to the public. The co-founders said that by focusing on that group, they’re able to advance that work as they promote broader use of the platform for consumer-facing projects.

In the initial blog post, Mine provided details on the process of selecting a structure for the platform, and why it believes IPFS is the best choice for a database, compared to other blockchains such as the Bitcoin blockchain or newly developed blockchains.

Mine cited IPFS’s ability to store “large amounts of structured data,” which they said is interesting because IPFS has a more readable format than its peers, Walden said, because Mediachain only reflects the type of media, not the actual files of the media itself.

Still, Walden said Meidachain’s decentralized nature is key to its success, given the failure of the Global Repertoire Database (GRD), a higher-profile and more funded project that aimed to build a database of musical intellectual property and compositions.

The Global Repertoire Database (GRD) project was launched in 2008, bringing together stakeholders from the technology and recording industries to invest €23-32 million in this digital property management system, but the project fell apart due to failure to deliver and financing difficulties.

Walden said that what they learned from this failed project is that centralized solutions are not the best way to handle digital intellectual property storage:

“The goals of that project are very similar to ours, but our belief is that what a global repertoire database needs is decentralization.”

Building Trust

Although Mediachain is very thoughtfully designed, it will have to adapt to future challenges that exist even before it is created. For example, how will it deal with bad actors who want to appropriate the work of others?

Walden and Nazarov again cite their examples of involving public institutions as examples of how platforms can seek user trust.

The Mine team says it has been working on a platform that will allow Mediachain users to annotate images, using a reputation system that allows others to trust the information on the platform.

"I can claim that I created the Mona Lisa, and the idea is that this alliance approach allows you to trust that other people can vouch for the correctness of a piece of metadata. That's the value of the project," Nazarov said.

They also said they believe the Mediachain community could gain or lose trust over time, depending on how it maintains its open-access resources.
Here, Nazarov cites the past achievements of Internet communities and their ability to gain credibility as proof that this approach can be successful.

"On Wikipedia, if you see an article about George Bush, you believe it is true because the information provided by Wikipedia is reliable."

Important media applications

Once Mediachain is up and running, the Mine team believes it could potentially be integrated into existing popular social media platforms.

They say that new media companies like Tumblr could offer its users the ability to search for images (even those that have been significantly modified by later creators) simply through its application programming interface, which in turn could allow Tumblr to better monetize its business through improved data analysis.

"Once images are on Tumblr, they lose all analytics. Cross-platform analytics is a contributing factor to this, and we think this is an irresistible temptation for the big platforms," ​​said Nazarov.

Additionally, Nazarov and Walden see apps like Facebook and Apple exploring possible collaborations in order to gain control of mainstream media content around the world.

Nazarov and Walden said Mediachain’s authentication and reliable information about intellectual property would be even better if it could meet the needs of large commercial content creators.

“The idea is that as a publication, CoinDesk could publish an article and set the terms for that article so it can be used in an app, like Facebook’s ‘Instant Articles’ app,” Nazarov said.

Building on past work they predict that more new results will easily emerge, which will allow them to innovate on this platform layer, on which most market leading players such as Spotify and Netflix have been created, with few rivals between them.

However, Mediachain is currently concerned that adopting new technology will slow down their work progress. IPFS is called a "cutting-edge" technology, and its ability to promote development goals may affect their own development roadmap.

Additionally, the Mediachain team sees some follow-up issues around ensuring database durability and setting metadata standards.

However, the platform is now seeking developers to work on overcoming these challenges, as the project’s launch post states:

“This is just the beginning.”

Original article: http://www.coindesk.com/mediachain-blockchain-tech-next-spotify/
By Pete Rizzo
Compiled by: Kyle
Source (translation): Babbitt Information (http://www.8btc.com/mediachain-glo…ights-database)