Nowadays the market for art is increasing its power thanks to social networks and platforms that allow anyone to express and publish their artistic creations on the web. Omitting the fact that we cannot always define those creations as ART, the democracy of self expression is growing up.But on the other hand – with this system, on the web – anyone can save or copy content, cheating the real author.
Source: Coin Telegraph
There is a war o
f innovation going on behind the scenes.
While everyday users are shopping on Amazon or watching auctions on Ebay, software developers from one man startups to industry giants are rushing to stake their claim in what many believe to be the most revolutionary technology since the internet.
The first cause of this burst of activity was started when Satoshi Nakamoto developed a new kind of money and called it Bitcoin.Bitcoin itself is based on the concept of a blockchain, which is a public register that is maintained by all parties involved audited transactions and then coming to a consensus about the data that has been stored. Think of the blockchain as a spool of kevlar tape kept in the middle of the town square, and consensus about a block is the equivalent to writing on the tape with indelible ink. Instead of one trusted central entity, like the Federal Reserve, the federation of blockchain users are the distributed trusted authority.
Source: Forbes
The global music business offered up two cheers this week for the first signs of life in the recorded music business in nearly a decade. According to International Federation of the Phonographic Industry’s (IFPI) latest global sales report, total recorded music revenue grew 3.2 percent in 2015, to $15.0 billion, the biggest jump since 1998 and the only growth since 2012, when sales ticked up 0.3 percent.
The overall growth came entirely from digital sources, particularly streaming revenue, which jumped 45 percent over 2014, to $2.9 billion, or 19 percent of total revenues. Physical sales continued their decade-long slide, falling another 4.5 percent, buoyed somewhat by the continued renaissance of vinyl.
The strong streaming numbers were evenly distributed, however.
Subscription streaming revenue accounted for $2 billion of the $2.9 billion total, as the total number of paying subscribers reached 68 million, while industry revenue from ad-supported streaming amounted to a mere $634 million, despite more than 900 million listeners worldwide.
As digi
tal currencies and the technology behind them become more widely adopted by incumbents and startups with a global presence, the need for consistent laws and regulations governing them is ever more apparent.
The Washington, D.C.-based Chamber of Digital Commerce, along with three other of the world’s leading digital asset/blockchain trade organizations (with “blockchain” being the shorthand to describe the technology), Tuesday announces the launch of the Global Blockchain Forum, an international body whose mission is to help shape international blockchain policy.
“The Global Blockchain Forum is a platform for international collaboration,” says Perianne Boring, founder and president of the Chamber. “We’re bringing together the leading trade associations representing the digital assets/blockchain industry around the world. As we engage with these various governments, it’s important that the associations and stakeholders working with these public policymakers have some type of coordination to their efforts.”
Source: Forbes
Only very recently has the digital medium caught up with more traditional approaches in its ability to be valued seriously by collectors. Up until now, a digital piece of artwork could easily be downloaded copied and shared inconsiderately, making ownership a bit of a sham. Creators of original digital artwork (myself included) have more often than not resorted to creating a physical signed version of the original file so as to achieve a more genuine salable item.In truth, a digital piece of art can still be copied and shared, however, emerging technology has changed all this radically.
A collector can now buy or inherit legal ownership of the original digital artwork and then choose to resell it as it goes up in value.
This is where the emergence of Blockchain technology, offered by businesses such as Ascribe, provide a truly innovative solution in securing the provence of a digital file.
Ascribe is a significant new online service that utilizes this new technology empowering “creators to truly own, secure and track the history of a digital work”. Being a digital artist, what I find so interesting with this service is that it enables the creator to register artwork using a unique cryptographic ID stored on the blockchain. Ownership of the digital artwork can be passed on through email directly to the buyer or alternatively the rights of transfer can be consigned to a gallery.
Source: HuffPost
A group of 18 music industry organizations, representing songwriters, publishers and musicians, filed comments last week with the U.S. Copyright Office in response to the office’s congressionally ordered inquiry into the operation and effectiveness of Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, otherwise known as the “safe harbor” provisions of the law.
And to make a long filing short: they don’t think it’s working very well at all.
As discussed in a previous post here, people in the copyright industries have been pining for years for a do-over of the safe harbors and notice-and-takedown procedures, which they claim have amounted to a get-out-of-jail-free card for online infringement, and the music groups came prepared.
Their 70-page filing (including appendices) is chock full of colorful charts and graphs, footnoted legal arguments, and research findings, all purporting to demonstrate conclusively that the Section 512 bargain, which was intended to provide a limit on the liability of online technology providers for infringement by their uses while creating legal tools for copyright owners to get infringing content removed from the web, has been rendered null and void by advances in web technology and overly narrow interpretations of the law by the courts.
For decades, copyright infringement and illicit use of digital content has become major issue for digital content providers.
Regardless of the efforts of search engines and government-backed organizations to penalize illegitimate users of copyright-reserved content, blogs, corporate websites, e-commerce shops, and media outlets have continued the use of copyright-reserved content, due to the lack of infrastructure to detect such illicit activities.
Blockchain-based digital content record platform Ascribe has launched a service called WhereOnTheNet to enable artists who ascribe their work on the blockchain to trace the pathway of their content on the web. By utilizing an intelligent and intuitive blockchain-based software, Ascribe’s WhereOnTheNet allows users to search sites which used their images with or without permission from the content provider.
Source: NewsBTC
A long-standing problem with digital art is that it can be easily copied, even stolen, leaving artists with little control over their work. But now, with help from the blockchain technology underlying the Bitcoin digital currency, graphic artists and illustrators are finding a new marketplace that protects their pieces’ originality and authenticity.
“It’s a very interesting time to be not only a digital artist, but also a young collector,” said QuHarrison Terry, co-founder and chief executive officer of Victory is Very Illuminating Inc., also known as 23VIVI, a Madison start-up that is among the pioneers in creating a marketplace for the art.
The company has a website that is only 8 weeks old. But Terry and co-founder Ryan Cowdrey have experience and influence in the digital art world.
Source: JS Online
As the study of ‘sma
rt contracts’ went from strange academic curiosity to the cutting-edge of FinTech, most market observers are still wondering just how this revolution in value transfer works.
Smart contracts, for those who still don’t know, are small bits of code attached to an asset, which determines where and how the underlying asset will perform based on events in the network. The promise of financial instruments that are routed through the economy autonomously, and without need for intervention by a custodian, is immense.But exactly how does such a technology work? And what makes a smart contract different from similar solutions for financial logic that have been commonplace for decades in our modern banking system?
Source: CoinDesk
With the growing buzz around the Blockchain technology, we have gathered predictions of experts from different branches of the industry, on its future evolution and prospects going forward.
Blockchain and Bitcoin have become mutually inseparable, however Blockchain is much more than just a collection of records for a cryptocurrency. A Blockchain is at its core a ledger of records, which is distributed across different parties. It can only be updated with the consensus of the majority of the participants it is shared with and is inerasable. The beauty of the Blockchain is that its applications go beyond cryptocurrency transactions. 2015 saw a lot of hype around Blockchain and its adoption by the mainstream financial services industry.
Source: CT