Copyright Your Photographs with Blockchain Tech: CopyTrack ICO
If you are a photographer who is struggling to make ends meet by selling your photos through mediums like Shutterstock and Dreamstime, or if you’ve actually witnessed your images being used on websites without your permission, perhaps Copytrack is something you’d be interested in taking advantage of.
There’s two sides to this one.
First, they enable you to copyright your photographs so that consumers can lawfully purchase rights to use your work. Second, Copystack also has a system built to detect your photographs that are used throughout the web, enabling you to pursue monetary settlement for your work that the violator has been taking advantage of.
Here’s how it works, as a photographer, once you’ve created a free account, you can upload an unlimited amount of photographs onto Copytrack’s registrar. Once the photographs have been verified as your own, you are provided a certificate of authorship for the images which are included on the blockchain.
You can then prove your ownership of those images by providing the private addresses if ever the need arises. The ownership of the images via the certificates are also freely transferrable.
The thing to keep in mind that your identity will need to be fully verified since this is directly related to who owns the photographs.
Once your images are registered onto the blockchain, the Copytrack web crawlers are sent out into the web to search for your images.
If any duplicates exist you’ll be notified and can decide if the use of these images are indeed an infringement of their copyright. If you’re then interested in a monetary settlement Copytrack will handle everything for you, even the court case.
Copytrack seems to be making a true attempt to help both sides by taking many steps before any real legal action is taken. They even allow for “post-licensing” which seems to be a good way to negate this whole sue culture. These allow violators to purchase a “post-“license to avoid costly and time consuming legal battles.
From what I can gather about the team behind this company, I’d say they are capable of this venture. Particularly the CTO who is a specialist in software development and focused specifically on image recognition. So Copytrack’s native token, CPY will be used to fuel the smart contracts that interact with the registrar and will allow for automatic payments to copyright owners.
If this is something you’re interested in, they are currently in the presale phase in case you wanted to get a bit of a discount, otherwise the public sale begins on January 10.
Additional Reading/Sources:
Copytrack Website
Copytrack White Paper
Compare to others like Shutterstock and Dreamstime
Compare to Pixsy, PIXRAY and others (Page 7 of White Paper)
The concept seems practical and useful, but I have some doubts that Copytrack's crawlers will be very effective. I'm fairly certain that countermeasures will be developed eventually to fool these software image trackers.
Secondly, how would Copytrack be able to tell if the author claiming ownership of an image is in fact the author of that work?
I'm not sure of the effectiveness of the crawlers also, but to verify that the photographs are indeed your own you'll need to provide the RAW or at least the original JPEG file.
I'm deleting raw files after photoshot/lightroom using
Check out digital watermarks. They are being implemented in video services now. Photos and music will be next. The advantage to using blockchain is that they extractions to identify the watermark will probably be faster than the current method.
Interesting, thank U Heidi
Yes and this is very timely especially for those who are into professional photography. A lot I am sure will be interested on it especially with the boom of great cameras in our smart phones. This has a lot of market having billions of people with their smart phones today.
I also love the way you explained it, it seems to me that it is easy and simple to use, except on the aspect of getting fully verified, I wonder what documents are to be submitted before being verified. The experience of getting verified with some exchanges nowadays truly sucks. Hope that it is as simple as Face ID .
Well, we have to see through it in the future as it is still on pre-sale and ICO. But will be checking on its progress. Thanks for sharing!
From what I've read of the white paper, it seems that at least regarding providing proof that the images are indeed your own includes providing the RAW file or original JPEG only (page 13 of white paper) In regards to verifying individuals they aren't as specific.
Thanks for the update... I am sure they will soon provide info or users will provide reviews as soon as their first product/project is launch.
Thanks for sharing this, looks very interesting project.
Wow this could be the future of copyrighting. A lot of times people could be copyrighting their work and not know about it. Now technology will investigate violators for us.
Really good. Makes me think of becoming a photographer lol at least seems like a good investment.
Nice article, as well you should check out Fast Invest ICO! Grea team with already operating FinTech business!
Really fascinating piece! Would you advise investing in the CPY token?
Vote me please
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