Hello!
I’ve put the presentation in Barcelona from David Proto the cofounder of Creativechain on paper with mostly his own words but in a “third-person perspective”.
He starts by saying that he’s going tell us his story so we can understand how they ended up creating this amazing project, then he says that he doesn’t have a computer technician profile, nor he is a programmer. Professionally, he had many jobs related to the multimedia sector, also he’s always been working in artistic contemporary productions and art that is related to social activism. He then started learning about how author rights worked, especially creative commons licenses that nowadays are very popular, however, back when he started very few people knew about them.He ended up working in the fin-tech sector, in projects related to mobile apps for payments in shops, bank transactions and that’s when he started hearing about Bitcoin and the technology ‘block chain’ in 2013. With his creative background, he was imagining how he could use the block chain to make it work in the media sector. If we only think about the ‘time-stamp solution’ it provides, it could be of great interest to artists who publish online contents.
The block chain technology used to be mostly just for international transactions but with the timestamp side, it can be used for work transactions, registering and demonstrate at an exact time your ownership. Then a few of them really started to think they could propose some kind of ecosystem that would solve a lot of the problems that have digital content creators nowadays. Example, anyone can publish something on the internet and instantly it can be copied, doubled or even mixed. Anything can be done, so they started to think how they could do to give a person in this situation some type of certificate that proves the work was recorded by him. Instagram, for example, has a centralized server which means they can, technically, manipulate the data so because of that if you go to a trial you can’t really prove your ownership. Unlike the block chain technology that is used with the creative chain, Instagram can be hacked, manipulated or even burn down. A way to avoid this is to register any kind of content on the block chain. That’s what they have done with the creative chain technology/creativecoin. At the moment, what they want to do with the platform is to register and distribute content, where the authors of their creations are certified in an indelible way. In addition, you can distribute the content, sell it, make different types of contracts. Imagine if you could upload something and automatically distribute the percentage of the revenue to each person who worked on said project. On a bigger picture, TV channels, on contract they could pay its author rights for the reproduction of a movie and all those who participated in the production will also earn money from it equitably.
It is also a way to chain pieces of art, which is the most philosophical and utopian side of the platform and it’s actually what they like best. Any person who uploads a digital content can chain the project to another person, through a Creative Commons license/free licenses, that allows you to modify the original work so you could upload your work and someone else would be allowed to take it and rework on it. Nowadays people take artworks on the internet, photos, videos and use them to make remixes that are finally a new work. Often people don’t put the original author’s name but with the platform, you could directly chain the works without the need of consulting anyone and reward the rest of participants in the chain with a percentage of all incoming funds. This way, creative chains will be generated where you could see not only the production of an author who produces a piece of art but also all the creative chain that is supporting it.
We are not aliens who just came to Earth and invented pieces of art with any kind of influence. We all have influences from a million of cultural things, from the streets, from the internet… We copy things, we read books and we act influenced by the culture that surrounds us. Why not gratify all that culture that we are chaining? Right now there are invisible chains between all of us so why not chain them and give them that gratification for having created the final project? This is something that can be done with creative chains and many more… make donations, payments, distribute funds to workers involved in a same project and all that without the need of a boss who decides how much will earn every one. It is decided by the community and when someone receives a payment it is automatically distributed. This could also work in theater/cinema, it could work for any creative community where there are micropayments, pay per view, per consumption, a ticket to concerts. It is an open source platform, everyone can use it. They are not the owners of it, it’s software is free. Right now anyone could use it for any other purpose. The Creativecoin is also open source and is already in markets.
He finished by saying that they’d like to see more projects, apart from them, use creative chains so if anybody who has just heard of this project is interested in linking any kind of cultural or digital production to a creative chain you can contact them and they’ll try to make this chain become a constellation someday.
https://www.creativechain.org/project/
video version (Spanish) : https://youtu.be/gD6QlCyOXeA
