> Imagine being able to connect with the artist of a viral GIF you see in your feed, learn the history or origin of any image, or automatically reward a musician whenever you press play.<p>OK, I've gone and imagined it. I'm not entirely convinced that any appreciable number of people actually want to do these things though.<p>Is this a clever application of a trendy technology creating a solution that's searching for a problem? What are the real life <i>business model</i> use cases for such a tool?
Hey HN, I'm Denis, one of the creators of Mediachain. Happy to answer any questions!<p>This Co.Design article does a great job of explaining how Mediachain helps creators:
<a href="http://www.fastcodesign.com/3060426/could-blockchains-solve-the-webs-image-attribution-problem" rel="nofollow">http://www.fastcodesign.com/3060426/could-blockchains-solve-...</a><p>Here is our official fundraising announcement with more details:
<a href="https://blog.mediachain.io/mediachain-labs-funded-by-union-square-ventures-andreessen-horowitz-to-build-a-universal-open-337ee690f61b" rel="nofollow">https://blog.mediachain.io/mediachain-labs-funded-by-union-s...</a>
It's a great idea with a lot of utility, but my question is: How does dispute resolution work? I.e. How do you prevent bad actors from beating the original artist to the punch, and registering someone else's artwork as theirs on the blockchain?
What happens if someone crops and scrubs the metadata of the original image and then shares it? Can mediachain identify the original source of the new image?
How does your perceptual recognition technology distinguish piracy from Fair Use? Given the impossibility of knowing with certainty which jurisdiction the end user is in, which Copyright scheme are you assuming? Can works be registered as Public Domain or as subject to a permissive license such as Creative Commons?<p>This sounds like you're making an Internet-scale DRM scheme. What precautions are taking to protect people from creators trying to take more than copyright provides?
Ok. How about this:<a href="http://i.imgur.com/heXkHzU.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/heXkHzU.png</a><p>It's a partial screenshot of the article in my browser. I intend to use it in a lecture as an example of the complications behind fair use. (irl I really do teach such a lecture). Who is it attributable to? The artist of the drawing, me, techcrunch or mediachain?<p>In short: I am suspicious of any service, and there have been a few, that claims to be able to identify the owner or creator of a work. It's a layering problem, with nearly every digital image being at some level the property of a great many people.<p>(fyi: if this was a law exam, the best answer is "me" in that I created the composition and am well-covered by fair use in my use of it here.)