How broken windows and the New York Subways inspired Veredictum’s blockchain-enabled anti-piracy and distribution platform.
In the mid-1980’s the New York subways were a mess. Graffiti, urine and fare dodging were everywhere. Muggings were as regular as the timetable itself. This lethal cocktail greeted New Yorkers on their daily grind; a lethal cocktail that took a turn for the worse when Bernie Goetz took the law into his own hands. With four loud cracks, the four youths that dared to mug him lay wounded on the floor blood seeping from their fresh wounds. In Malcolm Gladwell’s great book, the Tipping Point, this was the catalyst that sparked change for the New York subway system.
Up to this point, poor standards had been tolerated. Change failed to materialise because no-one cared enough to make it happen. It’s like broken windows in a bad neighbourhood. If broken windows don’t get repaired it shows no-one cares, and when no-one cares more windows get broken and the bad neighbourhood remains bad. The Bernie Goetz shootings resulted in the glaziers being called in.
The subways were cleaned fastidiously. At terminal points on the subway lines graffiti was removed completely every time the subway train arrived at the terminal station. At the same time, instead of taking up to 8 hours to book a fare dodger, police trucks were brought to stations reducing the booking time to 1 hour. In a nutshell, the environment was improved and the deterrents were improved. Slowly, and surely, over time the subways improved. When I first read this, a warmth enveloped my spine. I knew I had just seen our exact strategy to help the film and video industries with piracy.
So much of piracy happens because distribution is broken. If you can’t get access to content, when you want, how you want, at a price point that is fair what do you do? In these times of nano-second attention spans, and the fluidity of Global communications if you hear the great feedback on story lines of your favourite show on social media and you can’t buy the content locally there are many pirate sites that will feed your craving… And where are the deterrents? People pirate because it is also so easy to do. So, what if we saw things differently?
Rather than just than solely using the fairground “Whack-a-mole” approach to attacking the the piraters, we want to hit the drivers of piracy, sprinkling them with a bit of blockchain’s magical dust and the chinking of crytpocurrency coins?
Veredictum’s anti-piracy and distribution platform does this in four ways:
1. Global registry if video-based content certifies and references ownership and distribution rights. Video files are then digitally fingerprinted with reference to those rights. Registered files can then easily be identified across the internet.
2. Members of the creative community become “nodes” of our Decentralised search and detect structure for registered content — think SETI (the decentralised search for extra-terrestrial Intelligence out of Berkley University*) but for registered content.
3. These same members that represent the “anti-piracy advocacy” then become the nodes for “white-hat” peer-to-peer video distribution.
4. Wrapped around both structures, is a marketplace that brings content producers directly together with key market influencers and their tribes. So, for example, boxing fans can be brought together with boxing content providers via market influencers to collectively bid for content they want to watch. The “we-commerce” for film and video if you like.
The cryptoeconomics are straightforward too. Nodes get rewarded via Ventana, our cryptocurrency, for providing the infrastructure for search and detection and white-hat and distribution. For example, it would be a nightmare to administer a micropayemnt to pay someone for 2c of bandwidth or electricity via FIAT currency (USD , AUD EUR etc). This is further complicated by multiple currencies, multiple jurisdictions and the typical minimum credit card fee of 35c.
Collectively, the node-based structure brought together by the creative community supported by a cryptocurrency incentivisation structure means there is easier access to content and improved trackability and detection.
In other words improved environments and improved deterrent s— just like the New York subways…
We are the glaziers for the broken windows in the film and video space — after all Ventana , our cryptocurrency, is the Spanish for window and we are re-thinking film and video distribution one broken window at a time .
About the author: Tim Lea is the CEO and co-founder of Veredictum.io. The Veredictum token sale is live until 08:59am UTC September 11 and you can support the campaign today by visiting https://tokensale.veredictum.io
* (SETI is the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence out of Berkley University — where signals are sent into outer-space looking for intelligent life. The data is received back at Berkley and passed through to 3m people globally who process that data remotely and send it back to Berkley.)
