Get back control over your photo work
Blockchain, Photography and Picter
If you follow the latest in photography industry news, you may already be familiar with how blockchain technology could change the industry. Most photographers know the headache that digital rights management can cause. Blockchain, therefore, has the potential to simplify this digital rights management, many times over, while giving back control to image creators.
With Picter, we are at the forefront of exploring the potential that blockchain technology holds for photographers and people working with images. In this article, I want to describe the problem that we see today in the photography market and how Picter plans to solve it in the future.
What is blockchain?
The advent and growth of Blockchain technology unleashes an unprecedented potential to fundamentally transform the internet and how its data is structured, organized and attributed in terms of ownership. It creates new markets and opportunities for everyone involved, on a fair and transparent basis, without powerful gatekeepers and intermediaries.
We are convinced that it will completely change the way we interact online.
As there are many articles out there explaining what blockchain technology is, I won’t go much into detail here. For example, I liked this easy explanation of Andrew Ross Sorkin in the New York Times: “Think about a technology that keeps a master list of everyone who has ever interacted with it”. There is just one trusted list, all changes made to the list are tracked, and every person who touches the list is known.
You most probably know of blockchain as the underlying technology of Bitcoin. Bitcoin was created as a currency with no central authority involved. If you do business in Bitcoin, you won’t need a bank that keeps track of your money flow. Every movement of this digital currency is transparent for everybody and stored safely on the blockchain. There is a ledger that is kept and updated communally by all the computers that are connected with the Bitcoin network.
What is wrong with digital rights management for images?
Have you ever experienced this problem? You were commissioned by a client, you created and delivered the work, yet were to be paid based on trust? Usually, this works for both parties and you continue to go along that way. Sometimes though, later you might find that your pictures were used more widely than you had agreed on. For example, you sold them to be printed, but with no web license attached. A year later, you discover the pictures were used on the client’s website as well. However, due to the fact that there was no contract, and you didn’t want to have all the hustle of suing the client, you just remained quiet, maybe wrote one email, called and finally let go. Because you thought that you’d like to continue working with that client (because some money was made, right?) and would like them to recommend you, etc. Maybe the misuse of the image wasn’t even intentional from the clients perspective. They might just have lost track of where they were allowed to use the pictures, where this information was stored or kept, and all this may be because the person in charge has changed, etc.
If you are licensing some of your images through stock-platforms, you’re most probably aware of the following fact: The image licensing market is scattered on many different market-places, each fueling their own, centralized data-silos with image-data and license information. This creates a huge pain not only for photographers, who decide to license some of their images through these centralized infrastructures, but also for image-consuming businesses (from single bloggers to enterprise media houses, as stated above). It is hard to track images back to their authors, licencing takes time, and immediate access to these images in proper resolutions is almost impossible.
Nevertheless, these scattered marketplaces are able to claim tremendous transaction fees by having their central position between photographers and image consumers. This drives image-prizes unnecessarily high while the actual producers still get the minor part of revenues.
But the actual problem is that closed and separated data-silos make it impossible to quickly track any image back to their authors and get fair licensed access to it.
This leads on the one hand to expensive processes due to the many manual tasks involved. On the other hand, it causes masses of copyright infringements every day.
Discovering these infringements is rather easy, thanks to the accessible image-matching and web-crawling techniques nowadays. Fighting them is easy too, since cease-and-desist services pop up every day. But that’s only fighting symptoms, it’s not solving the problems of an ever-growing circulation of image data between producers and consumers. And it’s actually not what anyone passionate about creating compelling images is really interested in doing, nor has the time to really get involved there.
How can blockchain technology help?
Blockchain technology is designed to record data and track interactions. All information is open for all involved parties, it is immutable and decentrally stored. It’s no wonder that blockchain has become such a buzzword. Money flows, property records or even votes could be stored in a safe and decentralized way — the possibilities are huge!
A photographer has to manage image rights and in a perfect world, they would be able to track who uses their images at what time and under what licence. Blockchain technology could help us to built this world.
Blockchain has the potential to give photographers back control over their images. They could sell them without a middleman, be notified automatically whenever somebody uses their image, and additionally ,could even be paid automatically for that usage. It is possible to build such an infrastructure with blockchain technology. Of course this is no short-term project, the road there is long and probably winding, but with Picter we started to go down this road and we couldn’t be more excited about it.
Long-term vision for Picter — A decentralized ledger for photography
Our vision is to build a standardized infrastructure for frictionless and secure image-delivery between producers and consumers. Integrated licensing is a crucial part of this infrastructure to provide seamless workflows for all parties. Building another centralized data-silo would be the traditional way of growing a business and strengthening our market position. But it wouldn’t solve any of the aforementioned problems, but rather fuel them.
We’ll make a difference by creating a truly decentralized and public ledger for image-licensing and ownership attributions without claiming control or ownership on it. Such a shared ledger (e.g. based on blockchain technology) only makes sense, if the majority of stakeholders (image producers and image consumers) have a benefit of using it. We think that only a shared ledger without a gatekeeper can create the necessary trust and thus gain enough traction to get this majority on the same page.
See the big picture — with Picter
We’ve been working in the field of photography for more than a decade now and experienced all problems described above first hand ourselves. Technology is offering exciting possibilities but someone has to step up and lead the revolution before the old-established entities built once more systems that are mainly beneficial for themselves.
We have the team and the vision that is needed to turn the photography market upside down and built a structure that is fair and transparent for everyone involved — photographers and people who work with photography like organizations, agencies or editors. Start to see the big picture and be part of this revolution. Join us at www.picter.com.
Are you interested in this topic? Let’s get in touch! Drop us a mail at hello@picter.com
Matthias Lohscheidt,
Chief Technical Officer at Picter
