Kodak has announced the creation of a crypto currency. The basic idea behind the coin is to create a platform which will allow tracking of digital assets and prevent their misuse.
KodakOne is a revolutionary new image rights management and protection platform secured in the blockchain that seamlessly registers, manages and monetizes creative assets for the photographic community.
Let’s look at the features Kodak is bringing to the table:
- Image registration – Makes sense, in order to track images, you need to prove they belong to you.
- Rights management – Every image use is recorded in the blockchain, thus tracking who can use it.
- Transparent accounting – Every transaction recorded in the blockchain, owners get royalty fees paid automatically.
- Community marketplace – Allowing members to purchase products, book studios, flights, etc.
- Distribution platform – This ties in with the blockchain – a marketplace to buy digital assets.
- Post-licensing – Kodak is developing a crawler that will monitor sites using assets without the needed licensing information. On top of that, Kodak can start the process to rectify the use of these assets.
- Image tracking – Members can track where the image has been used across the internet – and possibly offline?
- Instant payment – You get paid instantly for rights etc.
Digital rights tracking
In theory, the platform sounds great. Times when people steal and use digital assets for their own use without paying are mostly gone these days. People learned that if they want to use something, they have to pay for it. At the same time, a lot of assets are misused and the owners have no way of knowing or tracking this. I can see the major benefit for the rights holders. At the same time I can see a massive potential for agencies that frequently purchase digital assets. Especially if they can see how many times an asset was used and where – it is essentially not the best move to use an asset for a client who’s competitor used the same asset etc.
Post-licensing is again great news for photographers and other artists. Artists like to get paid for their work, people in general don’t mind paying for their work. Sometimes images are obtained with no clear license information and then it is impossible to pay royalty fee for them.
Shortcomings
As much as I like the idea where people who deserve to get paid will get paid, I can’t see the execution being very realistic. The amount of computational power needed to analyse every image on the internet and compare it with a database of images is insane. It could perhaps work on whole images but what if just a fraction of the image is used?
Hope for the coin
As much as I would like this coin to succeed, I cannot see it happening without integrating directly with big image banks, such as ThinkStock etc. There are however many optimistic people out there that see the future much brighter. As a result of the announcement, the stock price went up by 44%.
You can read more about the Kodak coin on the website.