One of the most annoying issues with publishing media on the internet is that sometimes you find something interesting online that you want to share in a forum or on social media, but you can’t tell the origin or the owner of the rights to it. In these cases you can either just skip the idea or post it anyway and hope that a digital rights management (DRM) lawsuit wont reach you one day. Now a group of blockchain experts are trying to offer a solution to this dilemma in the form of a technology that can trace all proprietary media.
Mediachain Labs, a firm developing a decentralized universal media library, has raised $1.5 million in its latest funding round led by Union Square Ventures and also included: Andreessen Horowitz, RRE Ventures, Digital Currency Group, LDV Capital, Alexis Ohanian, William Mougayar, Kanyi Maqubela, David Lee, Mathieu Drouin and Brian Message.
The firm uses a blockchain-based record with machine learning content identification for registration, identification, and tracking of all forms of digital media. It gives rights owners the ability to automate the discovery of where their content is being used in order to retain control over their data and “even create a channel for exchanging value directly through content, no matter where it is.”
According to Mediachain, over two million images or related metadata records have already been uploaded to its system by The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Getty Images, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), and Europeana. So if you ever thought about creating an animated GIF to express your feelings on an online forum – you better reconsider.
(Photo: pixabay)
