THELOGICALINDIAN - n-a
If it can be, it will be. It’s assured that back a new technology emerges, it will be acclimated to charlatan music, movies, and added bookish property. While the internet fabricated administration assignment easier, that affluence additionally arrive unparalleled levels of agenda piracy.
The music industry has been at war with technology back afore Napster, and Hollywood has hated customer pirates back the appearance of the VHS band and VCR. Now blockchain technology, which (in some ways) resembles the torrent and added p2p casework acclimated to charlatan adequate content, is boring finding its way into both industries.
Media and ball is a $735 billion industry in the U.S., and back mediums like radio and television are apathetic to adapt, startups like Netflix and Spotify can grab a huge allotment of the market. But the blockchain makes for an absorbing artifice in agenda absorb law that could account agreeable marketplaces leveraging the technology to accommodate music and beheld content… again.
Piracy Avoids Paying the Proper Dues
The better botheration the RIAA and MPAA accept with Silicon Valley is ensuring streams are tracked and companies accept able advantage for the rights to their work. Contract negotiations about this key affair are what accumulate Netflix, Amazon Prime, Pandora, and Spotify from accessing the abounding ambit of accessible music and video on the market.
Blockchain technology’s decentralized tokenization fixes this botheration tenfold.
What got Kim Dotcom’s Megaupload website and others like it in agitation was abortion to adapt copyrighted agreeable and atone parties appropriately. Even above sites like YouTube and Spotify accept to do this. Google does it for Internet sites too.
Blockchains like Choon, Livepeer, and YouNow administer blockchain-based tracking and models to atone creators automatically with a accessible ledger. The technology is solid so far, but none of the blockchain startups accept yet been accommodating to do one key thing.
By acceptable added of a MegaUpload than a YouTube, a blockchain-based alive armpit can action a library cipher abroad accurately can because of their contracts.
In our accepted system, a alive account like Spotify or YouTube charge clue plays and payout agreeable creators based on its information. How abundant Spotify pays the artists, against application as profit, is a alienated affair that causes high-profile musicians like Taylor Swift to abjure casework (and fans) the adeptness to use their music.
Megaupload’s sin was abolition absorb law and authoritative movies and TV shows accessible to beck or download online. So continued as the artisan is actuality compensated for the use of his or her work, it’s no best piracy.
It’s a bound of faith, but a aggregation can affair its tokens to the agreeable creators, agnate to what Steem does on its platforms. The blockchain advance book plays (and can alike be acclimated to administer them), while cryptocurrency is issued to agreeable creators.
This adjustment of distributing bill puts them in the easily of above businesses who would charge to barter them for advantageous tokens for their business, like GNT, which can be acclimated to purchase CGI processing power.
It would absolutely draw absorption anon enough, but by hosting these files and compensating artists fairly, a blockchain-based agreeable startup can succeed.
Unfortunately, as music alive cipher casework like Choon and Musicoin are discovering, architecture a agreeable archive isn’t easy.
The People Will Pirate Anyway
Whether you accede or not, bodies pirate, and the U.S. abridgement loses about $12.5 billion annually to agenda agreeable piracy. The RIAA blames piracy for absent revenue, but artists like Eminem, Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, and Justin Bieber bankrupt Billboard and Soundscan sales annal in a agenda age.
Imagine how abundant added they would acquire if we could acquisition a way to alter that added $12.5 billion into their acquirement streams. A two-token blockchain could calmly accolade both artistic aggregation and business aggregation with tokens for views. Ads, whether in sidebars or aural the agreeable could monetize everything.
Viewers/listeners would act as miners in this business model, and it’s not as adopted as it seems.
Video amateur already use a freemium business archetypal with in-game purchases and ads to monetize them. Proof-of-Skill on the blockchain is the abutting evolution. The television, movie, and music industries would artlessly be afterward the advance of video games.
When computers and the internet came out, it wasn’t continued afore their alliance to radio, TV, and cine agreeable become solidified. Now Spotify and YouTube plays are as important to Soundscan as concrete CD sales.
Centralization became an affair for aboriginal piracy antecedents like Napster, but Gnutella and torrents decentralized everything. Nowadays, Kodi preinstalled on apart FireTV devices aphorism the piracy roost.
The blockchain will accordingly be acclimated to both accomplish and action piracy. Who is activity to be the Kim Dotcom of the blockchain?
Kim Dotcom is making this exact play, acquisitive to hit the aforementioned bewitched blueprint he did with Megaupload in a blockchain 2.0 sequel. As we all know, Hollywood sequels don’t consistently absorb the aforementioned audiences though.
It’s a new world, and addition new may booty the reigns in the new age of piracy. What if that new charlatan chooses to artlessly pay his victims?
Risks vs Rewards
The aberration amid this achievement and a archetypal airdrop is the bodies amenable will either become the abutting YouTube or the abutting MegaUpload. Kim Dotcom is still in New Zealand angry displacement to the U.S. for that site’s “crimes” of illegally hosting fines.
Ultimately, bodies appetite admission to ball content, and the music and cine industries are accomplished for disruption. Anyone who can auspiciously absorb a arch agreeable library to the blockchain and tokenize plays will accept a hit on their easily that can always change the music and cine industries added than Apple.
We awning a lot of accepted use cases for blockchain technology, but one can alone admiration how it will be acclimated to combat… and accord to… piracy.
The columnist is not currently invested in any agenda assets mentioned in this article.
