How to Prevent Piracy in the Digital Art Industry
The potential of the fashion digital art market is enormous. But it remains restrained by a set of various obstacles. To name a few it’s piracy (copyright issues), and lack of monitoring of the use of art content. POSH’s mission is to resolve these problems and give a rise to a civilized digital art market where the artist can concentrate solely on the creation leaving all other issues to a platform built on the blockchain.
The POSH platform aims to resolve the problems of connection between a designer and the final buyer of the piece of art. This process is like to contribution that the Booking.com made for the hotel industry in 1990-s.
Absence of Infrastructure, or the World Before Booking.com and Expedia
Let’s have a flashback to 1996. This is the year when the Booking.com and The Expedia, were established. What was it like to search for a vacant room somewhere in Sydney, while you’re in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany?
An ordinary tourist was entirely in hands of travel agencies. They had business relations with hotels. And the tourist was a slave to a hotel chain or had to spend much time calling different hotels on his own.
For businessmen it was difficult to establish an independent hotel. An average client preferred to stay at chain hotels which had great resources for marketing and reducing costs. All these factors were pushing up costs both for hotels and for travellers.
The arrival of online aggregators has reduced costs of all parties. Now the supplier and the customer can find each other in seconds. It resulted in reduced costs of launching a hotel as marketing became affordable for all hotels no matter how big they were. Many hotels and hostels don’t even have their own websites as it’s no more needed for successful sales. Moreover aggregators made travel for ordinary tourists affordable. The same processes took place in aviation transportation. Online ticket sales boosted airline traffic worldwide.
That’s what online platforms can create for an industry. Of course, establishing a marketplace was not the only feature of the aggregators. They also secured transparent and fast payments to resolve disputes between hotels and customers. They made sure that customers get essential and correct information.
Paradoxically, we see that digital art market is still stuck in the analogues era. The problem here is the same as back in 1996 in booking hotels. No infrastructure enabling the parties to meet each other. They can not buy and sell the product in a transparent and secure way. This situation prevents the suppliers, i. e. the artists, from producing more content. Thus the consumers don’t have a wide choice of changeable content for their wearable things.
How to Calculate the Designer Royalty Correct
Imagine if you were a talented and well-trained artist who creates charming design works. But there is a problem:
the artist never knows how much, where, how, to whom and when his work was sold and to how much royalty he is entitled to. No a monitoring system to track retail sales of apparel and wearable things exists.
A usual contract between a creator and a corporation covers a fixed sum for the artist’s work. But the artist would have got more — if he could know how much copies of the piece of art exists. Now it’s impossible to calculate the royalty correctly.
OK, you may have thought that it will be impossible forever. To some degree, you might be right as a system to track is hard to invent. Just wait and read down the post, we have something to surprise you.
Another obstacle for an artist is the limited number of distribution channels. In fact, we have only three of them:
getting and accomplishing orders from persons and companies;
sales through galleries;
sales through photo stocks.
At first sight, nothing seems to be wrong here, and it is really so, all these channels work.
For a solid contract with a major fashion brand, you need to be well known and an established creator. If you are not a renowned artist, then you’ll have to spend much time, working for a brand just to have a good portfolio. Brands don’t overpay, they underpay and overcharge.
Sales via intermediaries mean very high commissions of the galleries and photo stocks. It comes up to 70% of the price in the catalogue. This percentage is not caused by the greed of stocks, as you may think. It is caused by a large number of coders, lawyers, marketing specialists. You pay for using old-fashioned, costly and ineffective.
But even collaboration with a major fashion brand (via stocks and galleries) don’t guard you. Even big clothing producers are often found guilty of using artists’ content without their consent.
(https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-how-artists-are-fighting-back-against-the-fashion-industry-s-plagiarism-problem). The same happens with works sold through stocks as platforms. They have no possibilities to track the fair use of work they sell. Production of a high-quality digital art content for fashion industry contains low fees for artists. Talented creators are unable to overcome great entry barriers to the market. So, they work like a commercial illustrator, designer at an advertising agency. They could become a driving force behind the development of the digital fashion industry.
And the final sad conclusion: the digital art content in fact is free now. No established market means no price which means it is de-facto free.
POSH As Gamechanger
POSH is a blockchain-driven system which makes all the transactions transparent. That’s just the nature of the blockchain as a technology. All sales of an artist’s works, the use of these works, all this is tracked by the modern means of the cryptography.
Payments are made just upon the buy without any involvement of a man-in-the-middle through a smart contract. Moreover, the creator is entitled to 5% from using of his content which was resold. And he doesn’t bother about getting it right as the payment is made. Many other things on the platform are also automatically conducted. That means less expenses needed for running the platform.
The financial model allows much lower commissions for the platform’s services than at stocks with their 70%.
The term “entry barrier” can be hardly applied to the POSH. An artist needs only getting through a simple identifying procedure. Upon getting approval a creator can download his products to be displayed. A huge audience will come to buy changeable content for their clothing and accessories.
And last, but not least. The cryptographic methods make it nearly impossible to steal content, even part of it. Any use of content is visible both to the platform and to the creator. It`s charged automatically through the smart contracts. There is just no space for illegal maneuver. All the space is given to the creation.
