Decentralized platform for photo sales and photo sharing, built on Ethereum | Hacker News Reader

Decentralized platform for photo sales and photo sharing, built on Ethereum

hack.ether.camp

112 pointslamitoto49 comments

What's your "lets not turn this into decentralized eBay for child porn" story?

That is a very big problem!! but https://ipfs.pics/ to some solves this by using "Votes"

The trouble is, this assumes people will vote CP down.

I do not feel that confident in mass moral behaviour. Observe Reddit.

What would happen if someone attached a child porn image into the block chain? A cursory Google apparently reveals you can include up to 30kb of data in a transaction (?). Wouldn't everyone who was in possession of the block chain also be in possession of child porn?

The interface, as in the website, is often a centralized point. Admins can remove stuff from there which easily deals with CP reflecting to a large extent the current situation - sending CP stuff to some fringe.

In more grey areas, although admins can remove, say, free speech pictures, the picture remains there, with anyone free to create a new interface allowing the picture to be easily accessed. So it's a bit similiar to the internet where anyone can - or maybe now, could - create a new site and upload the info.

You can then add more user level jury aspects on top, but I doubt anyone wants to face that sort of stuff and moderate it if the network was to gain scale. If we go back to the centralized website though, it becomes a bit interesting.

Take Milo's banning example - just because it is the most recent and comes to mind. We have the twitter website with Milo banned. Under this scheme, we can have a twitter classic with Milo not banned. Both of them have the same network effect, the same users etc, they identical in all ways, but in one Milo is banned in the other Milo isn't with the only other difference being that they have different domain names.

When we all agree something is abhorrent, everyone uses the non cp network through the centralized website interface, while some go to... like now we have internet and tor, when something is in a bit of a grey area, however, there is an added benefit.

Say, for example, reddit took some action against everyone's opinion. The current option is for everyone to move to a new site. That's of course a bit difficult as it requires a change of habit and changing habits can be stupendously extremely hard.

With this, or more generally, with a blockchain based approach, you don't ask anyone to shift at all. There is no shifting. All users remain, the entire network effect is still there. There are no bootstrapping questions etc. No starting back from zero. All there is, is typing a new domain, far, far easier than persuading everyone to start a new town in a ghost desert place.

So, it is obviously not a utopia, but, it is a bit of an improvement. The whole thing is very much at a cable switching for phone calls stage though, so, everyone is sort of considering this matters.

Well I suspect the design is not actually decentralised.

> Photos for sale are identified as rightfully owned by having RAW file details published to the blockchain (actual High Res image is not stored on chain)

Does anyone have a clue, how this should work? Eg, if I just 'steal' a pic and change slightly its brightness, color curve, crop, blurriness, etc. will the system still be able to identify the original?

Otherwise great idea.

I would imagine you're buying a copy of the photo in non-raw format, whether it be jpeg/png/whatever. If you don't have a RAW copy to post to the blockchain, it's impossible to steal it.

are you sure .PNG doesn't contain enough data to reconstruct a RAW file? I'm not...

Given that RAW can have 32 bits per channel and PNG only 16 bits per channel, it must be possible* to construct two different RAW files which render to the same PNG.

*Possible in the mathematical sense, it may not be practical.

Hi tw04, yes thats right, though it will depend also on the terms of the sale / license given by the seller, which in some cases may give the full rights to the image including the RAW file in some cases. All of which is under the discretion of the seller. In the case that they did give rights to the RAW file, then that user is the only one who gets the RAW file data, its passed to them via an ethereum escrow contract

While this is a great idea, I'm still not sure how we can find out (digitally) that a pixel was changed and a new copyright can be awarded.

I thinks it is pointed in:

-Photos for sale are identified as rightfully owned by having RAW file details published to the blockchain (actual High Res image is not stored on chain)

Call me a cynic, but can't I change a pixel and use the photo w/o the copyright?

Yes, and that's an eternal problem inherent to the nature of digital goods.

Look at Steemit for examples of people making money from original content.

Next feature to add, or deriving business to create: add an indexer/comparison service that checks the JPEGs and to see how similar any two given pictures are, and if one derived copy sells anything, the creator of the original picture gets notified.

Great feature, but I can't help thinking about the permissions you'd have to give for that

This could work from buyer/client side. If I want to buy image, I will check it with some service to be sure that I don't pay to pirate(newer&lightly changed image). But what If buyer doesn't use it?

I don't see the way how this could be implemented to blockchain. If every blockchain node downloaded and compared all images It would create massive bandwith and need for cpu/gpu power. Or am I missing something?

You are right, I don't see this going to the blockchain as well. But I am thinking of a service that runs outside of it, whose main purpose would be to provide (1) some legal support in case you want to file a copyright violation claim and (2) the basis for a reputation system.

Hi rglulis, yes thats a good potential feature for further down the road, we had ideas like that. To begin with we would be limiting such a service to the sellers within the content network itself, so the intensity of the checks are not that substantial. over time the extensiveness of this service would be expanded, first to not just check as sales get made, but to generally check on the content across the network, and eventually if viable to do web wide search as service to image owners (for fee of course). This would not be using blockchain (might be nice to use golem - eth supercomputer eventually though ;-) It would simply be a supporting service of the blockchain based photo sharing social network

I think that in such cases the rightful owner would point to the RAW photo on the blockchain and argue that his was published long before yours.

The remedy, in other words, remains legal. I see this as a tool for facilitating legal remedy. (Or have I missed your point completely?)

> his was published long before yours

That's not enough. What if someone publishes before the author. Say I buy something from other resource or even directly and publish it on the OP's.

I don't follow. Could you elaborate?

You know how you can download someone's video from YouTube, upload it somewhere else and make money off of it; what's stopping you from doing something similar with pictures here? Even better, with ether.camp you're an "author" since you published it first!

Technically there is no reason why you couldn't create a raw image from the jpeg, difficult not impossible.

Then the only benefit is the creator has got proof of the creation date, the pirate couldn't prove they created the content before that date.

I am assuming they hash the RAW file. Since JPEGs contain less information than RAW I don't think it is possible to get from JPEG to RAW to hash value matching the one from the original RAW.

But a pirate wouldn't need the original raw, just one that happens to produce the same jpeg.

The intent is to prove ownership, not to prevent piracy. You can't produce the 'owner' hash with your reconstructed RAW.

I note they also only display low res until you buy a high quality version. That's what I do too. If someone wants to save/share my low res images its no problem. If they want something magazine or billboard res (ie commercial) they have to come to me.

Hi throwaway049, yes thats right, both your comments spot on. The main goal is to prove ownership to support legal sale of image. and the real target for sales are buyers that need top quality high res images. Someone mentioned another idea for combatting pircay, eg identifying photos on the web that may be copies, and that is an interesting service that would be way down the road if at all.

I don't think you understand licensing.

If the pirate registers their own reconstructed RAW file, then there are two 'identical' pictures on the blockchain, and no way to tell which one is the real one. (It doesn't matter that the RAW files don't hash to the same value, because there's no authority who can tell you which version is the 'real' one).

Why should people trust that the images are 'identified as rightfully owned by having RAW file details published to the blockchain' ? Who says that the data on the blockchain is correct, and what stops someone from registering other people's photos under their own name?

One problem would be people stealing others images for profit.

It is good to design systems with the assumption that most users will use them as intended. There will always be misuse, but that can be adressed later if the system is successful. Compare airbnb, uber, dropbox. They all have very bad use cases. The systems were designed for the vast majority of users being lawful and for the most part it works.

uber was never designed to be lawful, its the entire issue i have with it, it was designed with ignorance of the law and has gotten away with it through utility and popularity...

not universal and needs nuance for sure, but...if it's giving a lot of utility to a lot of people, then maybe there's something probably a bit wrong with the law in the first place. So there needs to be some give.

and massive amounts of money spent on lawyers

> It is good to design systems with the assumption that most users will use them as intended

This is terrible advice. But note that two of your examples have ratings systems as a first-line anti-abuse measure, and dropbox like all the other hosting services do notify-and-takedown for copyright infringement. They also disable dropbox sharing if it's too widely used.

> It is good to design systems with the assumption that most users will use them as intended.

Not in cryptoworld. This is an application running on Ethereum. The entire point of the platform is to provide means for people to interact without necessarily trusting each other.

> Photos for sale are identified as rightfully owned by having RAW file details published to the blockchain (actual High Res image is not stored on chain)

If it's on the block chain and everyone has a copy can't I just copy it directly from the blockchain?

Hi sharemywin, no the photo itself is not on the blockchain, only the details about the photo & timestamp. the photo served on the website is not the full high res image. That is stored off chain

sorry about that. apparently I can't read things in parentheses even when I copy them.

Maybe it's just a hash of the raw? It says the image is not itself stored on the chain.

Which gives you what? Unless you release the raw file it could be a hash of anything.

check out haystack.im we build exactly that, only no Flickr or instagram on it yet

Thanks for the love guys! still looking for rockstar devs to join the hackathon team. front/back end + ethereum solidity. ping us on mark at stratagility dot com. Funding is incoming.

> looking for rockstar

For those who aren't into music that much, how about ninjas? :)

ninjas rock to ;-)

Naive and doesn't actually solve any problems, but hey good luck, have fun.

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