Blockchain

Everledger Plans Blockchain Database to Combat Art Fraud

May 3, 2016By rightstech

Everledger, the London-based startup known for uploading specifications on 980,000 diamonds onto the bitcoin blockchain, has announced a partnership with Vastari, a fine art and exhibition database.

Vastari, in which Everledger holds an investment stake, acts as a middleman between art museums that are looking for new pieces and private art collectors that want to increase the value of their art by getting it exhibited in public. This new partnership will see the art information possessed by Vastari written immutably to the blockchain.

Source: Everledger Plans Blockchain Database to Combat Art Fraud – CoinDesk

Chain, With Visa, Citi, Nasdaq And Others, Releases Blockchain Protocol

May 3, 2016By rightstech

Monday, one of the leading startups in the space, San Francisco-based Chain, published a new open source protocol, or set of technical standards, called the Chain Open Standard for building a blockchain network that can securely, privately and rapidly handle a large volume of transactions.

Depending on the hardware and network configuration, it can process tens of thousands of transactions per second. In contrast, the Bitcoin blockchain is currently capable of processing roughly six or seven transactions per second.

The Chain OS is focused on networks that can digitize the world’s existing assets (not a new currency like Bitcoin), whether commonplace ones like gift cards or more obscure ones like syndicated loans, and was developed by applying the technology to real projects in areas such as banking, payments, capital markets and insurance.

Source: Chain, With Visa, Citi, Nasdaq And Others, Releases Blockchain Protocol For Financial Networks – Forbes

Banks, tech companies move on from bitcoin to blockchain

May 3, 2016By rightstech

As a debate raged across the internet Monday over whether the mysterious founder of the bitcoin digital currency had finally been identified, executives at a major bitcoin conference in New York had a simple message: we’ve moved on.

That’s because bitcoin, the digital currency, has largely been supplanted by blockchain, the technology that underlies it, as the main interest of investors, technology companies and financial institutions.

“If there is a 100 percent opportunity in the blockchain, bitcoin, or the currency, is only 1 percent of it,” said Jerry Cuomo, vice president, Blockchain Technologies at International Business Machines Corp. “So there is a whole 99 percent that has broad applications across the broad industries.”

Source: Banks, tech companies move on from bitcoin to blockchain | Reuters

Copyright’s “Double Spend” Problem: Digital First Sales

May 2, 2016By rightstech

Lance_Koonce_DWT Jack Browning recently posted a great analysis regarding whether a new technology like the blockchain could revitalize the first sale doctrine under copyright law. Jack used a terrific analogy to explain the first sale doctrine, from the Hugh Jackman movie The Prestige. In the film, in order to create the illusion of teleportation, Jackman’s character – who had access to a cloning device only (just watch the movie, okay?) — had to murder his own duplicate each time one was created, so that there was only one copy in the world at any given time.

In the digital world, the problem is that it is difficult to kill the original work when you sell the original version to a third party – you are not effecting a physical transfer of your copy. Instead, what really happens is that you are making a copy of the work on a new computer, and the only way to get rid of the original is to delete it from the original location. To make sure that occurs, some trusted third party would have to ensure that the original copy was truly wiped from existence.

Sound familiar? It’s precisely the same issue cryptocurrencies face, which as noted was (many believe) solved by the blockchain.

Source: Copyright’s “Double Spend” Problem: Digital First Sales | Davis Wright Tremaine LLP – JDSupra

Welcome to the RightsTech Revolution

April 27, 2016By rightstech

Digital-hand Concurrent Media Strategies, LLC, publisher of the Concurrent Media blog, and Digital Media Wire, Inc., producers of Digital Entertainment World and the New York Media Festival, among other conferences, today announced the official launch of RightsTech, a new forum — blog, newsletter, conferences — for cross-industry global collaboration focused on furthering technology innovation around rights management and licensing across multiple media verticals.

The inaugural RightsTech Summit will be held July 26 at the the Japan Society in New York City. The newsletter, which you can subscribe to here, will keep you up to date on all the news and conversation around the emerging RightsTech ecosystem. This blog will be an evolving platform for discussion and debate among the various stakeholders.

For Blockchain VCs, the Time for Ethereum Investments Has Come

April 27, 2016By admin

Just a few months after the platform’s production launch, the first Ethereum startups are already receiving interest, and in some cases, undisclosed investments, from digital currency-focused VC firms.

Interviews with four of the leading blockchain and digital currency industry investors revealed that many are already performing due diligence on startups utilizing the decentralized application platform. Announced in 2014, Ethereum has gained significant traction of late following a successful hard fork and testing from major financial institutions.

Source: CoinDesk

What a Blockchain for Music Really Means

April 26, 2016By rightstech

music_splits Blockchain technology is what enables Bitcoin to allow financial exchange without a middleman. It is effectively a decentralized database where participants follow a protocol to record the ownership of tokens of value and their exchange, without the need for a central entity like a bank to provide trust.

An imaginative person will jump to extend the metaphors of such a system to other domains, and of course to the music industry. A music blockchain would be a single place to publish all information about who made what song, without having to trust a third-party organization.

However, before contemplating such a solution, it is important to distinguish between two distinct but often conflated problems in the music industry—because one must be solved before the other.

Source: Mine Labs