This is officially my favorite Product Hunt submission in months. Solves a complicated regulatory problem with tech. Removes friction. Makes people's lives easier. I hope it takes off.
This reminds be of that facebook prank a while back. It also feels overwhelmingly lame and awful. Seems like someone's looking to be kingpin of abusive IP litigation. GROSS.
"@sawyerfeels — Attorney, Conde Nast
@nathan_lands@nathanlands - any plans to assist with US registration, so your users can threaten people with statutory damages?
Nathan Lands — Blockai
@sawyerfeels yes."
We want to help creators protect their creations and earn a living. Not become a "kingpin for abusive IP litigation".
If you want to understand more about why we're building Blockai please read my medium post. posthttps://medium.com/@NathanLands/....
@llabball Thanks! Right now, we only prevent identical files but we use our matching engine, along with other signals to flag claims that look suspicious. Each claim is assigned a level of trustworthiness internally which is not currently publicly visible. This process will become increasingly automated but is still very much a work in progress.
This is awesome, Nathan. Social is a huge opportunity for content creators, but also very risky that one might lose monetization and credit. I love the integration of Blockchain tech, too. Thanks for building something awesome!
Hey PH’ers!
My name is Nathan Lands. I'm the CEO and Co-founder of Blockai, a copyright platform. Excited to be sharing with you all what we've built and to get your feedback!
We started Blockai to help artists and photographers claim and protect their copyrights. You put your photos on Blockai to claim your copyright. Then we create a permanent record in the bitcoin blockchain and give you proof. We search the internet to show you all the places your photos are being used. Soon we'll give you ways to deal with infringements as well as make money with your copyrights.
Today we launched "Blockai for Twitter", the first integration of many we're building. You just link your twitter account to your Blockai account. Then when you tweet a photo just add the hashtag #blockai to claim your copyright. We'll tweet a link to your copyright claim record.
Here's a landing page we created to explain how the integration works: https://blockai.com/twitter
TechCrunch & Fstoppers recently wrote about us:
https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/1...https://fstoppers.com/business/n...
Also, I wrote a blog post with more details about why we're building this: https://medium.com/@NathanLands/...
Hope you'll try out Blockai for Twitter! My co-founder Oli Lalonde and me are both here to respond to questions. Looking forward to your feedback. 😘
-Nathan
@davidnaffis thanks David! Many more integrations on the way. We're going to make it incredibly easy for creators to claim and protect their copyrights. :)
very cool - idea for you might be to use internet standard time in addition to the users local upload time :) or Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)
https://twitter.com/rexyinc/stat...
What a great solution and design!
From covering a bunch of applications of 'blockchain tech', this perfectly fits my thesis for a near-term success story. Immutable signed time-stamping is one of Bitcoin's greatest achievements, and is extensible to other products like artwork. This use case doesn't rely on complex (and at this point, experimental) feature sets like smart contracts, multisig and zk-SNARKs.
More importantly, it's clear that artwork is a perfect niche- low industry coordination requirements and zero regulatory challenge to create real benefits for participants.
I'm interested to know you address scalability challenges- is it a merkle root that's being entered to the blockchain on a set cycle?
Also how is the copyright monitoring managed- is it based on a web crawler or something more advanced like ML?
Thanks @vijaymichalik, spot on analysis!
We're indeed writing a merkle root at a fixed time interval to keep our cost constant no matter how many claims we get.
Our matching engine uses a perceptual hash algorithm which is good and efficient for detecting visual similarity between images. ML would be helpful to understand the semantic of images (e.g. there's a lion in this picture) but this is not critical for us at the moment since two visually different images of a lion doesn't necessarily equate copyright infringement.
We will definitely incorporate ML at some point, perhaps as a preprocessing step (e.g. for composite images) for our perceptual hash algorithm as well as for fraudulent claim detection.
Hustle X