Mediachain’s grand vision: creating a blockchain-based artwork identification tool

Mediachain is a company that envisions using a blockchain-based tool to identify artists’ works across the internet.

On the internet, 'aggregation' is often the highest form of flattery. But not everyone likes compliments.

Content in all its forms is increasingly becoming the commodity and currency of the digital age, but the speed and ease of nearly instantaneous global communications and the ability to proliferate endlessly now make it easy to separate creators from their work.

Brooklyn-based Mediachain is hoping to change that.

By using a decentralized media library similar to blockchain and combining it with content identification technology, anyone can register, identify and track creative works on the internet or within applications that use the company's tools.

Denis Nazarov, co-founder of Mediachian, said:

“Mediachain is a universal media library with an infrastructure inspired by Bitcoin and leveraging a content recognition technology similar to that used by Shazam and Google Image Search.”

Application developers can use content’s metadata to automate attribution, preserve data transfer histories and provide analytics for content usage.

Mediachain explains the service on its blog:

Imagine being able to see a GIF linked to an artist in the preview and know the history or provenance of the image, or automatically rewarding the musician as soon as you press the 'play' button. Developers can create this kind of technology with more consideration for tools that can discover and re-use our universal culture.

The Mediachain repository already has more than 2 million images and metadata records from content repositories from institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, Getty Images, the Digital Public Library of America and Europeana, Mediachain said.

Jesse Walden, one of Mediachain’s other co-founders, said,

“If all information on the internet can be shared… with Mediachain, you can identify the author of the media and the story behind the image.”

Walden said the goal is to make content consumption more efficient and frictionless, saying:

"Today, if a photo goes viral, millions of people can see it, but the person who created the photo may never get the reward."

Attribution is a foreign concept to many online services. Misattribution or plagiarism occurs.

Walden said:

“It is futile to try to artificially create information scarcity. There is a difference between this controlled reduction of information and artificially creating information scarcity.”

Existing copyright rewards have all attempted to create scarcity of works, but have all failed.

Walden and Nazarov both lived through the early days of Google’s file-sharing ecosystem, when Napster, BitTorrent, and Tumblr were all file-sharing platforms that were mostly free… and largely unregulated.

While these resource-sharing platforms excel in innovation, both Mediachain co-founders I spoke with were aware of the fact that creative control is often lost in the hands of creators because these resource-sharing platforms fail to engage and engage audiences.

One thing that creators of resource sharing platforms need to do is to give creative control of the platform to the audience and present the original authors of the works to the audience who appreciate their works in an invisible form.

In this regard, investors such as Andreessen, Union Square, Digital Currency Group, LDV Capital, Alexis Ohanian, William Mougayar, Kanyi Maqubela, David Lee, Mathieu Drouin and Brian Message all reached a consensus with the founders of the resource-sharing platform.

Walden said:

“The idea behind Mediachain is that the internet economy is an attention economy, where everyone is a creator and you can post on Instagram and Tumblr and you get likes and followers. That way you can make money through the platform, and the way you make money is by proving ownership of your work.”

On Mediachain, ownership of work comes from publishing and creating a Mediachain node on the system. Developers can register content using the Mediachain protocol, and when more developers log in, they will be able to spread Mediachain datasets on different platforms.

For both Nazarov and Walden, the attribution question on Mediachain is more than academic: Nazarov, a fine art photographer by training, is now a programmer, and Walden helped Nazarov start an information management company that records artists like Solange Knowles.

Walden said:

“Mediachain’s vision is that if creators are good at finding creative inspiration in their work and are able to distribute it, they can then distribute the entire process themselves and ultimately make money from resource sharing platforms in a way that has never been possible before.”

He also said:

“We live in a world where the media market circulates freely.”

In the eyes of Mediachain’s founders, the online media sharing model needs to be flipped. However, this needs to be achieved with the help of creators, not the platforms that publish their works.