Protecting Rights to Digital Works with Blockchain Technology
A New York startup called Mine Labs has started a metadata protocol based on blockchain technology called Mediachain that uses the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), a “hypermedia distribution protocol,” to protect rights to digital works, according to Nasdaq. Other blockchain-based authentication systems use an encoded ID to reference centrally-hosted data, but these have limited storage per transaction. To encrypt and store digital rights onto the bitcoin blockchain, most blockchain startups do one of two things: 1) they encode an ID onto the blockchain using OP_RETURN or CoinSpark to....
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The European Parliament has released a report, “How blockchain technology could change our lives,” summarizing the capabilities and challenges of blockchain technology as well as its possible impact on social values. The report, presented by the European Parliamentary Research Service, noted that among all the potential applications, self-executing contracts are creating ways for companies to operate automatically. The report noted that blockchains are especially helpful for situations where it is important to know ownership histories, such as managing supply chains. Despite the....
Blockchain technology has been tapped for its various applications in record-keeping, be it for digital files or banking-related databases. Can the underlying technology behind bitcoin also be used to streamline intellectual property rights in the music industry? In particular, a public ledger could introduce significant innovations for copyrights, particularly for derivative work, such as those shared through the app SoundCloud. This app allows users to make remixes of existing songs and share these with their followers, but this has raised the issue of copyright infringement. Music....
Entrepreneur and artist Stephan Vogler wants to change the art world, and he is using Bitcoin to do just that in what's considered by many to be the epicenter of contemporary art, Berlin, Germany. Vogler's novel block chain technology inspired license seeks to change how art is purchased and traded. By creating a system of rights to copyrighted works in digital form, Bitcoin can turn art from mere collector's pieces to limited and tradable virtual goods. Artists have long attempted to make their artwork scarce by creating limited editions of their pieces, as well as numbering the pieces.....
Verizon Communications has filed a patent for a Blockchain technology for managing passcodes. The telecom giant, the largest in the US, filed the patent in May. The technology, apparently in development for years now, would deal with the management of digital rights. According to the patent, the purpose for this application of Blockchain technology is the tracking and management of customer passcodes: “The DRM (digital rights management) system may maintain a list of passcodes in a passcode Blockchain. The passcode Blockchain may store a sequence of passcodes associated with the particular....
Recently, I discovered a cool new service that allows anyone to verify an idea, document, or file on Bitcoin’s blockchain. Bitproof is one of the first companies to expand on the idea of document storage within the blockchain, one of the many uses of Bitcoin 2.0, the next generation of blockchain functionality. Bitproof is one of many companies participating in the Boost VC incubator in Silicon Valley. Boost VC was founded by Tim Draper and currently provides funding and mentoring to several Bitcoin startups. After looking into Bitproof.io more, I knew that I wanted to write about it.....