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Comment by goodroot | Hacker News Reader

I know HN isn't too spiced up about Crypto, but it's important to realize that lots of these "cryptocurrencies" are built atop Ethereum -- that's part of what makes it magical.

This is leveraging Ethereum, to create a currency, to address a market need: photographers getting appropriate renumeration and accreditation for their work.

Picture this: you snap a photo, its hash is on a decentralized public record. If someone uses this photo, you're aware of it and can be rewarded/credited appropriately.

We can scoff at the blockchain-ization of all these applications, or realize that they really do have far-reaching implications. Whether the investors are patient enough to wait for the benefit to become actualized, though, is a whole 'nother matter.

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> Picture this: you snap a photo, its hash is on a decentralized public record. If someone uses this photo, you're aware of it and can be rewarded/credited appropriately

How will you be aware of it? And what prevents someone from tweaking one pixel by one bit, changing the hash of the new image?

>How will you be aware of it? And what prevents someone from tweaking one pixel by one bit, changing the hash of the new image?

I suspect this would be solved by visually comparing the two images and noticing that they are one in the same. Than you can just see which had their hash published on the block-chain first to see which is the real one.

Yes, but if you can identify an image in that way then you can claim the copyright anyway. Searching for copyright violation is the challenge.

>but if you can identify an image in that way then you can claim the copyright anyway.

Just identifying the images are the same doesn't prove which was the original though. The hashes being publicly available is the key, because you can easily tell which came first.

That would only work if the knockoff image is registered on-chain after the real image. If I'm going to rip off an image, I'm not going to submit it back to the entity that created it.

Hashes don't verify the date that something was created. The blockchain provides a date for the hash, but it provides no guarantee that the hashed item didn't exist long before when it first appeared on chain. If I simply modify the image metadata to say that my knockoff photo was taken at an earlier date and flip some bits, I can still claim that mine is the original and that I didn't submit it to the blockchain when I created it.

I don't think you need a blockchain to do that; just a data base. I don't think that the courts would even need a hash - just evidence that a photo had been made at a time, that it was stored somewhere would be a bonus.

Kodak has done a lot of research in the last 20 years to create digital watermarks that resist manipulation.

So they wouldn't necessarily naively hash an image file, but they could possibly create a hash from features that are extracted from the image and remain consistent even after manipulation or transformation.

Or they could hash the original bits in the file naively then insert that hash into the original image as a digital watermark that would survive manipulation of the image.

> Picture this: you snap a photo, its hash is on a decentralized public record. If someone uses this photo, you're aware of it and can be rewarded/credited appropriately.

Except if that someone changes a single bit in the photo data (which will result in a completely different hash).

That won't stop you from visually identifying that they are the same, then just looking at the block-chain to see which hash was published first (and thus the real photo).

Unless there's a parallel repository of all the images in a form that's easy to search (some kind of sparse, feature-rich form that's quick CV-match friendly), which isn't the hash, you're going to have a hard time with that initial assessment and enforcement of potential infringers.

That right there could be a pretty expensive system to maintain and it isn't ideal to distributed across a bunch of blockchain participants, it probably has to live in a Kodak server farm somewhere.

But who will determine whether two different images are visually the same?

What’s the point of a decentralized system if a trusted third party decides which images are visually equivalent? Just use that third party to register the image with in the first place, rather than in a blockchain, since that party gets to invalidate your image-hash in the chain anyway (in case your image is deemed visually equivalent to an image earlier in the chain).

I disagree with the characterization of magical. Ethereum is already having issues with scaling (e.g. low amount of TXs per second and non-trivial fees). Plus, everytime you interact with an ERC-20 coin, you have to pay the fee in ether.

I'm not saying these ideas aren't cool, but implementation of them sucks. If you look at the Kodakcoin, it seems the Kodak name is only being used and the company itself isn't involved in the project.

“This is a WENN digital currency,” Kodak said in a statement. “Eastman Kodak Company will not be an issuer of the ICO, will not receive proceeds on the ICO.”

"Today Kodak and WENN Digital, in a licensing partnership, announced the launch of the KODAKOneimage rights management platform and KODAKCoin,... WENN Digital, in partnership with Kodak, is the creator of the KODAKOne platform and the KODAKCoin cryptocurrency." [2]

[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/kodak-boards-the-blockchai...

[2] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/kodak-and-wenn-digital-par...

How do you know it's leveraging Ethereum? Link?!

“We are using Ethereum Smart Contracts, but we’re also developing our own proprietary blockchain and will evaluate the optimal solution during development,” Kodak said in a statement." [1]

It seems that the Kodak name is just being used by a company called WENN Digital for this cryptocurrency. More importantly,

“This is a WENN digital currency,” Kodak said in a statement. “Eastman Kodak Company will not be an issuer of the ICO, will not receive proceeds on the ICO.”

[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/kodak-boards-the-blockchai...

Immutable append only databases exist without blockchains. Why does this need to be decentralized and distributed?

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