Want to Take Back Your Digital Property? Bitmark and Blockchain Can Help
Bitmark Inc. is focusing on helping people take ownership of the digital property using blockchain. Based out of Taiwan, their small but talented team is lead by Sean Moss-Pultz and has been making great strides to help people take back and control the distribution of their creations, whether it be music, data, and anything else in between. We had a chance to visit Bitmark and sit down with Casey Alt, Head of Product, and Jessie Tang, Business Development, and talk about their startup, how it works, Taiwan, and their views on the future of how transactions will work when it comes to digital property.
Jason: First off, can you give general overview of your startup and what you guys are trying to do here?
Casey: Sure, what Bitmark is trying to do is to fuse a blockchain to digital property. The way we think about that is most consumers are creating all this value online, and a lot of it comes from their data, but they don’t really own the data, or it’s ambiguous whether they own the data. A lot of the big valuations like Google and Facebook are basically based on that data, but individuals don’t really have any power to buy, sell, own, and do anything with their data. It’s not even just legally [speaking], there’s just no market for it, there’s no real clear way to do that.
So a big part of what Bitmark wants to do is allow anyone to assert ownership of their data, and the way we think about is that for us, property equals some asset plus a [property] title. In the digital world, we want to say “Ok, if you have a digital asset, we can issue you a digital property title, which we call a bitmark.” Then we collect all those property titles, and to record transfer of titles, we use the blockchain.
We think one of the biggest things a decentralized digital economy needs is this sort of property system, and we want to be the ones that builds the infrastructure.
Jason: With that, you would also be moving into any nation’s legal framework in regard to who owns what in the legal sense, so for Bitmark, how would that be incorporated? What would be the process and what would be the challenges?
Casey: When we were originally designing the structure of the blockchain and what we wanted to record, we went back and forth about these things like “Oh, do we enforce copyright? What do we do with things like copyright and patents?”, and what we decided was to keep it as minimal as possible for what you need to show ownership.
Any asset that somebody puts into the system, they register it, we take a fingerprint of it (a cryptographic hash of it), we put that in the blockchain, and then anybody who wants to claim ownership can issue bitmarks, so for example you could say “I want to sell 50 copies of this photo or this song, or give my data to 50 people.” That’s how we think about it in the system, and that transfer of ownership of that bitmark means that you have the rights to use that. Copyright varies all over the world in terms of enforcement, and period of enforcement (Is it 17 years? Is it 19 years? Is it 50 years?), and all we want to do is just have a system for people to claim what they own, and then record the transfer of that in a way that kind of goes beyond international laws, but the idea is to mesh it with them completely, and when we talked to lawyers about this, they actually get it. Once we say “This is a property title and what the blockchain does is secure the chain of title. It shows clear the ownership of title”, they say “Oh, that’s great.” They see how it fits into legal frameworks, and then the exact adjudication and decisions of that are left up to the local laws.
…when we talked to lawyers about this, they actually get it. Once we say “This is a property title and what the blockchain does is secure the chain of title. It shows clear the ownership of title”, they say “Oh, that’s great.”
The courts have very elegant ways and have evolved to have really good rules for property rights, and it’s already kind of decentralized to some extent; it’s usually out of a local level. We actually think that’s pretty smart. The problem is it’s just missing anything [related to digital]. In some ways, technology has evolved so fast that laws haven’t kept up, but the laws are pretty good, we just need to bring [legal and digital] together. It’s almost old-school: we’re bringing digital stuff back to where you can really own things, and now we think it really makes sense for that to happen.
Jason: Can you take us through the process step-by-step? For example, I make a song, and I want to make sure no else steals it, so where do I start?
Casey: The first thing is the web app that allows anybody to come in, easily set up an account with an e-mail address, and then they can upload the file. We store that on our server for them, we protect it to the extent that only people who own a bitmark to it can download it. We’re also currently adding encryption and other things that make it far more secure.
Let’s say I issue 10 bitmarks, and then John wants to buy one, or you just want to transfer one to him. The way we’re going to do it for the transaction is he would pay with Stripe with his credit card, we’d check it, make sure the transaction is approved, and it would transfer to you.
We originally also had bitcoin payments, but then the blockchain got so slow [laughs]. It would take like two, three days to verify a transaction, so the engineers are working to also take Litecoin, and now that Bitcoin Cash is out, we think maybe we can use that and Zcash and other ways of processing cryptocurrency. We just backed up and started doing Stripe for a while because at least we could rely on it [sic].
Then once that purchase has been approved, the title would transfer to John [sic] and we can check the blockchain that John has access to that title, he can download the asset.
Jason: Then once it goes from there, if anyone needs to challenge someone within a nation’s legal framework, they can show the blockchain and bitmark as some type of proof of ownership?
Casey: Exactly. It’s also using private/public key pairs (just like Bitcoin) so you can say “Yes, I registered this asset. I can prove it; here’s my digital signature in the blockchain; I hold the key to this account” and then John could say “Yes, I did or didn’t receive transfer based on what’s in the blockchain” and we could at least have some sort of accountability.
The way we’re thinking about data right now, it’s something no one is thinking about: how to own it. The way we’re trying to come into that is through this collaboration with UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health. When we talked to people about selling their data a year ago, they were like “Ehh…I don’t know, is it really worth anything? I don’t know, why would I want to sell my data? It sounds complicated.”
…we can have buyers (e.g. insurance, healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies, etc.) come in and say “I want this kind of data from these kinds of people. I’m willing to pay this much” and we could have a data exchange start to emerge where we match the buyers and sellers. We can show consent, because they’ve transferred the bitmark.
But then when we talked to people about donating their data [for example from their Fitbit], if it could help science, and you knew it was safe, secure, and private, everybody’s like “Yeah! I’d totally do that! Sure, why not? It’s just sitting on my Apple Watch or Fitbit.” We thought that was a really good first step to commercialize the data. It’s just to get people in the habit of seeing that their data is valuable, and that people want it, and that we can prove that process in a way.
So the Dean of the School of Public Health got excited about this, and we funded two graduate research fellowships. That’s about to launch in a week. They’re still waiting on some of the institutional review stuff, but we’re getting the technology there so they can launch in a week.
We funded two people, and that will allow them to broadcast this study into this app, and then anybody who wants to contribute can do it, and what we do is use Healthkit on iOS devices: we get their data, package it, zip it, encrypt it, issue a bitmark for it, and then it transfer it to the researchers. Once they have the bitmark, they can download the data, unzip it, and start using the data.
That [process] actually seems to make sense to people. Where we would like to get with that is once they start to do that, we can have buyers (e.g. insurance, healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies, etc.) come in and say “I want this kind of data from these kinds of people. I’m willing to pay this much” and we could have a data exchange start to emerge where we match the buyers and sellers. We can show consent, because they’ve transferred the bitmark. You can authenticate against the hash that is in the blockchain. That’s what we would like to see.
Jason: Therefore, it’s not about the shady side of data purchasing, but you’re actually getting consent from the people digitally transferring their bitmark, their ownership?
Casey: Yeah that’s how we think of it.
Jason: You’re accepting payment through Stripe, but you’re going to be doing Bitcoin Cash, Zcash, and Litecoin?
Casey: Yeah, right now because of the problems we were hitting with Bitcoin, they [the developers] figured out how to process payments and they made this generalized payment server that can check across these different currencies, and also to pay miners; we want to pay miners who secure the blockchain. It allows them to get paid in whatever they want, and not have it all tied up in Bitcoin. It actually cuts quite a bit of problems for us: to decouple everything, and make it more currency-agnostic.
Jason: When I first heard about your platform, the first thing I thought of was Digital Rights Management: when you buy Microsoft Windows, the 12-string of characters that comes with it. If you were to take a direct comparison between that and your platform, how does your platform compare to DRM, and what are some of the advantages over DRM?
Casey: Sean usually says “Property rights are the anti-DRM” [laughs]. I think a lot of DRM is intended to police rather than to empower people. Our philosophy is that you can do DRM-like things with Bitmark and the blockchain. If you’re a videogame manufacturer and you choose to put your game out, and you want to use Bitmark to check the blockchain (to make sure somebody has ownership before they play the game), you can do that. You have some things like DRM.
The difference is that it’s not centrally controlled, and the rights of that game [according to the bitmark] are I could buy that game, I could sell to Jessie the bitmark, now she has the rights; now you have resell, which doesn’t exist with DRM. We feel that property rights have figured this out: what property is, how it should be governed, what rights pass with the transfer of title. What’s annoying about DRM is that [property rights] gets stripped away, and it’s really up to the corporation (or the consortium) to decide what goes into there. We feel like “why?” [laughs]. We know what property is already, so if we can bring [digital property rights] back into alignment with that, it’s better.
The other thing is that we feel that a lot of piracy that happens is actually the result of not having access to really being able to legitimately purchase something, especially in Taiwan: if you ever watch any movie, it’s almost impossible to get the movie and rights here to watch something on HBO. It’s really hard because they haven’t figured out the licensing agreement, or it’s just not lucrative to sign the licensing agreement. We feel like “It’s for sale. This is how much it is. These are the property rights that come with it.” It takes a lot of that frustration out of it.
Jason: Why Taiwan?
Casey: We just all happened to be here [laughs]. Sean had a company previously called OpenMoko that was making open source cell phones, which was really a cool project. Then after the iPhone came out, and Android came out, they didn’t really know what to do with the company, but they were still functioning as a company, and Chris was the main software developer, and I came in then, and we working on some projects together 4–5 years ago and we were working on some other things [as well], and we were just so excited about Bitcoin and what was happening in that space and we were just reading about it, and we were doing some things in digital media and digital assets, and we had the idea for Bitmark.
We thought about starting the company in the US, but then this is where our home is, and we wanted to keep the team together; these are the people we wanted to do it with, and we thought Asia’s just got so much going on; it’s worked out well for us. It’s really cool to have one foot in Asia and to see how things are developing. Even with things like digital payments: Wechat Pay, Tencent Pay, AliPay, all this stuff is going on with that, it’s all just fascinating: to have exposure to that, and to see the bigger Bitcoin/cryptocurrency community in Asia.
[Also] for our first round of investing (seed round), a lot of people that came in really liked that we were outside of Silicon Valley actually, and that we had a bigger international perspective on things. I think because these things are so decentralized and international, it’s worked out for us. We also have a regional office in Vietnam as well [for developers].
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