Art

When it comes to bitcoin’s use as money, word-of-mouth has been its biggest asset.

The journey from Internet obscurity to interest from financial incumbents has been a long one, but it started with passionate users, willing to discuss its benefits with friends, and those friends, intrigued by the idea, began to explore – and spend – the currency themselves.

Bitcoin, because of its peer-to-peer design, thrives on connection.

As this conversation goes viral, talk of digital currencies is spreading across the globe, and one community that has been drawn to bitcoin (and the blockchain) is artists. To date, this includes big-name festival staple Imogen Heap and rappers-turned-venture capitalists Nas and 50 Cent, among others.

Source: CoinDesk

Digital artwork, from digital music to fine art, has been a growing area for a while now.

If a work is infinitely reproducible at no cost, however, how can a collector establish that they have an original or one of an edition? Monegraph takes advantage of the bitcoin database, the block chain, to log each transfer of a work (just as the database does for bitcoin), so that it really is set in stone who owns a digital piece at each moment.“It’s not about stopping piracy.

It’s about facilitating legitimate commerce,” Kevin McCoy, co-founder and CEO of Monegraph, told the Observer in an interview before the night’s presentations. He pointed to iTunes as an example of a marketplace for digital music.

He said people might have their complaints about how Apple did it, but it was a way for people to know they were purchasing authorized work. There hadn’t been a good way to do that before.

Once there was, people did it.

Source: Observer

RightsTech Extra

AI Companies Get the Picture

By Paul Sweeting

One of the biggest challenges facing copyright owners in grappling with the rapid development of generative AI technology, apart from a murky legal status, has been market failure, as discussed here in previous posts. The amount of existing material needed to train gen-AI models is so great, and so varied, that gauging the value of any one piece of it to establish a market price for it for licensing purposes is often effectively impossible. One group of rights owners is finding willing buyers among AI companies, however. An active, albeit for various reasons mostly sotto voce market has begun to emerge for the use of images held in large photo archives and by photo agencies and social media platforms, complete with per-unit industry and at least a nod toward creator attribution... Read More >>

Artists Turn to Bitcoin for Inspiration, Not Personal Finance

Bitcoin’s Database Now Powers Monegraph, a Digital Art Marketplace