anggita dewi: IMAGE PROTECT

IMAGE PROTECT

INTRODUCTION

Since the introduction of smart phones, it is estimated there are more than one trillion licensed images on the Internet today. According to a study conducted by Getty Images and Stock Artists Alliance, 70% of all visual media used on the Internet today are not authorized by copyright owners. This causes the loss of billions of dollars to content owners. The photo licensing industry is controlled by several companies that retain up to 85% of revenue permits leaving little profit for the creators and rights owners. Image Protect is a revolutionary content rights platform, leveraging blockchain technology to manage, protect and monetize digital media for content producers from all levels, publishers, and advertisers. Our embedded in-image ad format, IPShare ™, is located at the heart of our mission.

PROBLEMS & SOLUTIONS

1. Unauthorized Usage Monetization – IPShare™

Problem: 80% of all websites found using our proprietary image recognition and web crawling technologies cannot be monetized through traditional image licensing. This leaves the content owner with little to no time and/or money to spend on DMCA takedown notices.

Solution: Image Protect is introducing a revolutionary new digital licensing model, IPShare™. Instead of sending the standard DMCA takedown notice to an ISP or hosting company, we ask the website owner to replace the current image (jpeg or gif) with the same image that has been converted to the IPShare™ embeddable format. It’s as simple as copying and pasting the image into the user’s website template. It is a win-win for all parties, the creator enjoys revenue from converted CPM and CPC models, and the website/blog owner enjoys the use of the image without fees or penalties. Our solution will significantly change the current copyright and licensing landscape by locking in attribution, securely sharing content, gaining visibility, social engagement, ownership authentication, easy-to-use licensing, and revenue growth from online advertising. This interactive online image format contains in-image advertising, hot links, social sharing and dynamic messaging. This new technology derives revenue from the global digital advertising market, which is expected to grow to over $291B by 2020.

2. Content Marketplace – IPMarket™

Problem: The current picture industry is heavily dominated by giant image conglomerates, such as Shutterstock, Fotolia, and Getty Images, which in most instances, keep over 85% of the gross revenue per image. Artists suffer from lack of fair profit margins yet have nowhere else to turn due to the overall market share generated by these large image distributors. Users generate the value of these networks, but fail to be compensated in any manner as the distribution platforms lack any type of proprietary identification systems, solid tracking algorithms, and/or incentivized revenue models. Decentralization promises to solve some, if not all of these user-based challenges.

Solution: A new marketplace for digital images will follow the implementation of our Global Decentralized Copyright Registry. We will set the standard of digital content copyright management with smart-contracts to formalize existing licensing rights of digital assets, making them easy for a creator or photo buyer to use, transfer or modify. This in turn, will increase profits for content creators and decrease consumer expenses, while providing them with more product opportunities.

3. Rights Management – Smart Contract

Problem: Creators have little control over licensing rights in today’s marketplace. They are unable to set their own pricing or restrict licensing terms and there is little to no transparency into usage and provenance of registered content. Additionally, there are long wait times between royalty payments. Content buyers are often confused by licensing and legal terms, forcing them into piracy.

Solution: License your work – Transfer, consign or loan digital creations without losing attribution. Our easy-to-use platform comes equipped with clear legal framework and supports custom contracts. The Image Protect Terms of Service (TOS) makes smart contracts easy to use by creators and consumers. It incorporates actions like “I claim copyright rights” (creator, when registering a work into ascribe) and “I transfer copyright rights, or a license” (old owner to new owner). One can think of this as copyright in a box, easy to use by the layperson (creator, consumer). Image Protect works closely with lawyers in several countries as well as its own inhouse general counsel to develop a TOS that addresses these issues.

PayPal enabled electronic transfer of money between individuals, allowing money to flow across the Internet from and to non-corporate end-users in the ‘long tail’. Similarly, Image Protect’s smart contracts enable electronic transfer of digital property between individuals, allowing digital property to flow across the Internet and into the long tail.

4. Visibility into Usage

Problem: Due to the lack of a unified visual digital content registry, it is difficult to know if a particular work has already been used before and if so, which territorial rights have been applied to it. The surrounding legal issues can be tedious with everyone from an individual user to the largest of corporations facing legal risk.

Solution: Even richer visibility into usage of the digital property. Trace where and how your work spreads on the Internet. We show you all the sites your work has appeared on and its growth over time using. It would continue to support existing functionality of registration, transfer of ownership, loaning, renting, and sharing. It would support partial attribution among multiple parties. This includes attribution with the possibility of compensation for all creators, not just digital artists. Licensing will be rights managed, royalty free or creative commons. We are working on more complex licensing capabilities to support the evolving nature of international global media. There would be ways to increase visibility into how the work is reproduced, distributed, and what derivative works there are.

Visibility into usage of the digital property by auto-discovering where it’s used online and recording changes to ownership (provenance).
Tracking: crawl the web and show creators where their works are being used. Tracking leverages elements of machine learning and big data.
Screening: whenever a new item is registered, owners of similar IP that have already registered are notified.
Provenance: recording the history of ownership, and other transfer transactions. This web-crawl aspect is a posteriori approach to provenance discovery, and the registry a priori approach.

5. Proof of Sales/Licensing History and Legal Evidence – Blockchain Registration

Problem: The main problem with today’s visual image market is there is little to no sales/ licensing transparency, nor is there a simple mechanism to efficiently control and manage an artists’ copyright. These factors severely limit the potential for revenue and create legal issues on both sides of the licensing transaction. On one side, artists are losing out on a lion share of revenue due to the unauthorized usage from across the Internet. From the buyer’s perspective, some of the online theft could actually be converted into legal licenses if the blockchain information was contained at image level.

Solution: IPChain™ is a Global Decentralized Copyright Register for digital content, which Locks in Attribution to create a permanent and unbreakable link between the rights owner and their creative works. That link can be forever verified and tracked. Creators validate their copyrights and receive a Certificate of Authenticity (COA). Each registered asset comes with a COA, a built in unique cryptographic ID and the complete sales/licensing history. A user can access the chain at any time to verify and even print a copy of the COA. The registry will include, not only, time-stamped hashes of ownership transactions, but also the metadata (artist name, title, etc.) as well as the data blobs themselves (.mov, .png, etc.). Just as the current registry is owned by no one and accessible by all (because it’s the blockchain), we also envision this for the metadata and the accompanying descriptive information. With the appropriate incentives, this could evolve into an archival role that could serve as a unifying function for libraries, museums, and the Internet Archive (archive.org) of today

THE NEW PHOTOGRAPHY MARKETPLACE

Image Protect’s main focus will be on the global digital online advertising market utilizing our IPShare™ technology. Statista estimates the Ad market will likely stand at more than $227 billion globally. This figure could increase by more than 46 percent to $332 billion in four years’ time. One thing most observers are pretty sure of is that the digital ad market will show no signs of saturation in the foreseeable future.