One of the biggest, still-dormant use cases for blockchain technology is in the field of media – the overarching term capturing a slew of creative professions whose traditional business models have been upended by lightning-fast digital file replication.
Across various fields, the problems are clear: writers, photographers and musicians lack the ability to prove and protect ownership of their works and ideas, a prospect that renders monetization in a digital environment difficult.
In the face of this challenge, blockchain tech, with its ability to provide provenance , identity and micropayments has emerged as a potential antidote.
One of the more unique projects innovating in this area is Mediachain , a newly launched metadata protocol that allows digital creators to attach information to their creative works, timestamp that data to the bitcoin blockchain and store it with the InterPlanetary File System ( IPFS ), a distributed file system incorporating aspects of blockchain technology.
To Jesse Walden and Denis Nazarov, co-founders of Mine, the startup behind the Mediachain project, entrepreneurial innovators approaching the space have too often tried to undo how the Internet has changed media business models, rather than help those affected work more effectively within the parameters of this new reality.
As an example of its thesis, Mediachain is beginning its work by focusing on image data and attribution, using machine learning and blockchain tech to offer a service whereby users can not only attach identifying information to files, but reverse query files to search for creators.
At launch, the focus of the project will be on pictorial works, as Nazarov told CoinDesk: "With drag and drop and copy and paste, images are the easiest media type to share on the Internet. Images travel virally, but it’s hard for the creators and content owners to benefit. We really see Mediachain as a global rights database […]
