Blockchain

Mediachain Automates Attribution Online—Here’s How 

A new company operating out of a remote Brooklyn warehouse aims to make it easy to know who made something, even if the part shared on Tumblr or Facebook was only cropped out of a larger work. Mediachain is building a means a system that can identify creative work (visual, musical and literary) around the web and easily display the metadata from its inception. If it all works out, the anarchic distribution of creative work across social media will turn those posts into a vector for discovering the creators behind the work.

The team takes a bit of a nod from BitTorrent. That network created a unique hash for each piece of media, which Mediachain co-founder Denis Nazarov referred to as “content addressing.”

Source: Mediachain Automates Attribution Online—Here’s How | | Observer

Intel chips in with blockchain code for Hyperledger 

The Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Project has another big name on board: Intel.

The project was announced in December, but got its first serious impetus back in February when IBM slung its blockchain code into the effort. During this month, the project has coalesced further, and is on the prowl for more contributors. A joint proposal between IBM and Digital Assets has now become “Fabric,” an incubator-level project (under active development but not yet production-ready) that the two hope will form the foundation code base of Hyperledger.

Source: Intel chips in with blockchain code for Hyperledger • The Register

​Self-proclaimed Australian ‘bitcoin founder’ builds patent blockchain empire 

89538102_craig_wrightCraig Wright, the Australian who claims to be the inventor of bitcoin, is attempting to build a large patent portfolio around digital currency and technology underpinning it, according to associates of his and documents reviewed by Reuters.

Since February, Wright has filed more than 50 patent applications in the United Kingdom through Antigua-registered EITC Holdings Ltd, which a source close to the company confirmed was connected to Wright, government records show.

Source: Self-proclaimed Australian ‘bitcoin founder’ builds patent blockchain empire | ZDNet

The Uncanny Mind That Built Ethereum

Over the last two years, as Ethereum has evolved from concept to code, so too has the mystery surrounding Buterin. The resounding chorus of the people working on Ethereum is that he is to be admired and adored, and they are more than willing to contribute to Buterin’s colorful, often hilarious hagiography. I’ve been told by various people that Buterin learned to speak fluent Mandarin in just a few months, that he’s an autistic wunderkind, that all of his worldly possessions fit into one suitcase, that he once ate an entire lemon without removing the rind, that he’s an android powered by the Ethereum network.

Even those who have worked closely with Buterin seem mystified by him, as though this person is meant to be observed but not really understood.

Source: The Uncanny Mind That Built Ethereum — Backchannel

Bitcoin, Blockchain and Copyright 

A slew of new companies are betting on a new way to verify ownership of online content: Blockchain. In short, they are using the technology behind Bitcoin to protect and monitor content rather than currency and transactions.

But will this technology really work and will it motivate creators to sign on? The answer is unclear but what is obvious is that, while Blockchain-based solutions do have new capabilities to bring to the table, they also face many of the same challenges as their more centralized counterparts.

Source: Bitcoin, Blockchain and Copyright – Plagiarism Today

Putting Hollywood on the Blockchain

screenshot-singulardtv.com 2016-06-07 15-21-38The blockchain is a hot topic in the music business these days, featured on panels at nearly every industry conference and gobbling up acres of paper and pixels in the industry press. But it hasn’t gained nearly as high a profile in the TV and film business.

That’s in part because, while Hollywood has its problems, the film and TV business isn’t nearly as broken as the music business, and movie and TV people are simply not as hungry for radical fixes as many musicians are today. Unlike the music business, where the consumer’s embrace of streaming is blamed for pushing down profit margins and diluting artists’ earnings, the popularity of video streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime has sparked an explosion in scripted TV production and a boom in jobs and pay scales for actors, writers and other behind-the-camera personnel.

Even the major studios, who have watched subscription VOD services erode their once highly profitable DVD business, have benefited from re-selling back catalog to Netflix, Hulu and others.

That doesn’t mean there might not be better ways of doing business, however, or that blockchain won’t play a role in TV’s future. Startup SingularDTV is betting both will happen, in fact, and has set out to prove it.

Gideon Greenspan – Four Genuine Blockchain Use Cases 

Almost a year after first releasing MultiChain, we’ve learnt a huge amount about how Blockchains, in a private and non-cryptocurrency sense, can and cannot be applied to real-world problems.

Blockchains are ideal for shared databases in which every user is able toread everything, but no single user controls who can write what. By contrast, in traditional databases, a single entity exerts control over all read and write operations, while other users are entirely subject to that entity’s whims. To sum it up in one sentence: Blockchains represent a trade-off in which disintermediation is gained at the cost of confidentiality.

Source: Gideon Greenspan – Four Genuine Blockchain Use Cases – Blockchain News

How can blockchain change the music industry?

The potential impact of the blockchain is a well-trodden path at industry events in recent months, but a panel at the Midem conference today aimed to find some new aspects to discuss.

On the panel: Joe Conyers III, VP of technology for Downtown Music Publishing; Vinay Gupta, release coordinator and general strategist for Ethereum; musician Imogen Heap, who has been exploring the blockchain’s potential with her Mycelia project; and Revelator CEO Bruno Guez. The moderator was Allen Bargfrede of Rethink Music at the Berklee College of Music.

Source: How can blockchain change the music industry?

Could Blockchains Solve The Web’s Image Attribution Problem? 

The success of Mediachain depends in large part on getting a lot of people to use it. For far, it’s secured some big partners—MoMA, Getty Images, and the Digital Public Library of America are all on board—but their next big step after securing funding is building relationships with more institutions and companies. That’s been a challenge—especially with art institutions that are reticent to even digitize their collections.

But Mediachain could solve that problem, too. “If a museum puts an image of an artwork online, it goes out all across the Internet and [museums] don’t know where it’s going without metrics or analytics,” says Nazarov. “One of the promises of Mediachain is it could enable you to know. We see it as enabling these institutions so they’re less afraid of opening their data. They could see open data as a business advantage to drive new types of engagement and interactions with collections and their organization.”

Source: Could Blockchains Solve The Web’s Image Attribution Problem? | Co.Design | business + design

ConsenSys And SingularDTV Partner to Build Film & TV Rights Management Platform 

SingularDTV (S-DTV), a first-of-its-kind Blockchain entertainment studio, is partnering with venture production studio ConsenSys to build a smart contract-based rights management platform for film and television on the Ethereum Blockchain.

Based on ConsenSys’ rights management prototype, Ujo Music, ConsenSys will support the S-DTV service, enabling it to attach usage policies and real-time revenue flow to its video and media content.

Source: ConsenSys And SingularDTV Partner to Build Film & TV Rights Management Platform – Blockchain News

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