Custos Media Technologies, a South African technology company is taking the fight to piracy by the use of the blockchain. The company was started in 2013 at Stellenbosch University and specializes in watermark technology, piracy economics, and blockchain technology.
What Does Custos Do?
Piracy is a global issue. If you've ever used torrent sites such as thepiratebay.org or applications like Kodi, then you've been exposed to piracy. Custos is attempting to combat that by attempting to trace the leakers of digital media onto these piracy sites, preventing it from occurring again.
How Custos Works
Custos embeds a monetary reward with a watermark into the media file which is being distributed by the creator. This reward, in Bitcoin, is a bounty to anyone who discovers the leaked media. As soon as the Bitcoin is rewarded, the creator is notified which allows them to know which copy and by whom it was leaked. This allows the company to remove the party responsible from their distribution list.
Did You Say Bounty?
If you've ever want to moonlight as a bounty hunter but afraid of getting knocked out by a wanted fugitive, don't worry, you can work for Custos. Custos allows anyone to become a bounty hunter anonymously and make money by finding copyrighted media illegally uploaded to the internet. Custos claims that some of their bounty hunters have already claimed bounties as large as $100. I signed up easily and will provide information on that in a later post.
Push Into Hollywood
While the large blockbuster studios have yet to adopt this technology, it is mostly inevitable that they will. Custos caters to the small Indie crowd but once their product is viewed over time, the large studios will come crawling to Custos soon enough.
How Much Money Custos Could Save Hollywood
In a 2016 Brave NewCoin article the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) was cited as making 38 Billion dollars in 2015 worldwide. In the same year, the chief of the MPAA, Chris Dodd, estimates that the total amount lost to the movie industry is around 1.5 Billion dollars. Multiply that year by year, I believe it could be upwards of over 2 Billion.
Conclusion
Based on the influx of leaks and hacks the movie industry faces year by year, it is very likely that Custos, or another company with a similar model, will eventually find it's way into the movie industry. I think what Custos has done is brilliant. By leveraging a reward to an anonymous army that anyone can join, they will eventually infiltrate the entire piracy network making it very difficult for media to be passed through p2p sites. Also, by the use of the blockchain, it is cutting off the hands that pass the media onto sources of distribution of pirated materials.