Hi guys! Imagine you find your Instagram photo (e.g. some beautiful landscape) on another resource. What would you feel? Would you be proud of yourself or angry because nobody asked your permission for posting this photo? In this article I will review the issue of copyrights on the Internet. Despite the fact that legislative efforts have already been made to protect the right for content posted in the network, rules governing behavior with respect to such content are mostly blurred and opaque. Often users, without being aware of it, use digital images illegally – just due to lack of knowledge about licensing or the regulation of the rights for using online content. On the other hand, copyright holders sometimes find it difficult to prove their ownership of the original work or its derivatives. We even don’t speak about tracking the use of these works on the Internet and detecting violations.
Still, there are some initiatives to change the situation. One of them is the project of Copytrack company that has been on the market since 2015 to provide copyright owners with an opportunity to monitor the use of their creative work on the Internet and to resist the misuse of intellectual property.
Just getting back to the example with a “stolen” Instagram photo, we can determine the following problems existing is this area. These are: lack of protection of photographers’ and artists’ works placed in social networks; difficulty of contacting the real authors and, consequently, negotiating with them about the possibility of publishing their content; difficulty of acquiring the relevant rights to use; impossibility of taking corrective actions by authors; high fees when using stocks, which to some extent provide protection from misuse of content.
Copytrack Success in the Copyright Enforcement
As we can see, Copytrack is an established business with existing customer data base. This year, Copytrack launches a project to create a distributed database for the storage of a decentralized registry of digital content, in which intellectual property objects are matched with the respective owners. Some progressive functions of the new ecosystem will be possible thanks to the blockchain and smart contracts. The use of the blockchain technology will help preserve historical and current information about digital content, such as an identifying hash, the public key of the owner and previous owners, the history of payments for the right for using. Smart contracts will be used to simplify payments for the content usage and transfer of copyright. To ensure that all these operations occur in the ecosystem easily and without problems, the team launches a special token. At the time of recording on the platform, the content is included in the database as a smart contract with such information as a hash of digital content and the public key of its owner. Updating of information occurs through a message certified by an electronic digital signature. This message, for example, will contain the public key of the new owner and the amount in the CPY tokens paid to purchase the right for content usage. To execute a smart contract, a user has to pay a fee. For registration of content, the fee is not charged (but the creators of the content must pass the KYC verification). Using of the platform for copyright protection implies creating an account, uploading the content, verifying its genuineness, providing a blockchain based certificate that confirms ownership, and ensuring full monitoring over the copying of content. In the following scheme you can see the existing solution and the developments following the token sale:
Copytrack system ensures a regular monitoring of the uploaded content in the Internet. In case an image is registered twice, a conflict resolution procedure is provided. The platform’s robot will periodically check the Internet for copies of content and notify the copyright owner in case of positive findings. If the copyright has really been violated, the owner turns to the Copytrack platform, which deals with the problem through enforcement and licensing.
In order to further develop the solution with a blockchain integration, Copytrack team launches the token sale which is soon to be ended (more info here: https://copytrack.io/). If you are interested, hurry up to make it at the last minute. You can also support the project by participating in the variety of the bounty campaigns (see the links below for terms).
Useful links:
Website: https://copytrack.io/
Technical Whitepapers: https://copytrack.io/pdf/Copytrack_ICO_Technical_Whitepaper.pdf
Business Whitepapers: https://copytrack.io/pdf/Copytrack_ICO_Whitepaper.pdf
Bounty Details: https://copytrack.io/bounty
Telegram: https://t.me/copytrackhq
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/COPYTRACK/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/copytrackhq/
My ETH-address: 0x9F8051399114A4C8b9A742Dbb51C10162E61F234