Kodak’s Dubious Blockchain Gamble
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Minority ownership in a random company owned by a former fraudster and 3% of the tokens with their own name on it? So many things wrong with this. Where is the secret deal that made this happen? Did the Kodak CEO get 40% of the tokens in his personal wallet? For a multi-decade, legacy brand to entrust that guy with their future is rather bizarre. If this fails, it is quite possibly the last nail for Kodak..
At their peak in 1988 they employed 188,000 people, with over 60,000 of those in the Rochester, NY area.
Today they employ fewer than 6,000, with only about 1300 in Rochester.
Another imaging company where Kodak has its HQ is going through a similar but slower downturn. You could say they are ... copying them (sorry). I think when a lot of the baby boomers finally retire from the workforce, office printing will drop off a cliff as far as usage goes.
Could it be that you've been playing by different rules? Maybe Kodak was always like this. Who knows.
The equivalent of the founder taking all the remaining company funds to Vegas and betting it all on black.
- How do you explain (to the tax man, really) where the money comes from?
- Isn't this a gross misappropriation of company funds, and very much illegal?
- How does this guy find pants to fit his enormous balls?
He took a loan from the company; if he couldn't pay it back then yeah he is in deep trouble but he could.
This actually triggered a random memory of some court-room drama where a quant embezzled a bunch of money to buy lottery tickets though a system he devised, won, and then got charged after paying back the stolen seed money... in hindsight he woulda gotten away with his fictitious crime if he were a CEO or boardmember...
I'm surprised loaning money from the company is legal in the U.S., it's certainly not here. Probably because then you can fairly easily create a tax evasion scheme where you never pay yourself a salary and just keep borrowing money at zero interest and payment due long about five years after the sun explodes...
It's legal here in the US, but there are rules around minimum interest charges. I dealt with this during a partner buyout - the payment schedule HAD to have interest involved or else it was considered a fishy loan.
However if the amount owed is greater than ~£10k(?) at the end of the corporate tax year, you need to pay it back within 9 months or it’s treated as income and taxed accordingly (there’s also regulations about paying it off before the end of the corporate tax year and taking out directly after). Still 21 months for an interest free loan isn’t bad...
At the blackjack table.
Kodak Alaris is the company that makes photographic film (but not cinema film, that's Eastman). They're not going anywhere fast. I think that the number of film shooters, and demand for film, is going to stay relatively constant for the next decade.
These are the 5 packs of Velvia, Provia, and Superia. It's not a good sign, although maybe economically it makes sense? They've also completely killed off Acros in 4x5 and 120, I'm stocking up on the 4x5 boxes.
I'm hoping (most of) these can fetch good prices in ~5 years time.
The article doesn't say he's a former fraudster. It's irresponsible to throw these kinds of accusations around without solid evidence.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-01-30/iss-tells...
(search down for 'Kodak')
It's sad how far the brand has fallen.
The point is to build new decentralized protocols that will not be owned by any one central company, but will instead be the property of all of their users, who will fund their development by buying coins and who will then be rewarded by the increasing value and usefulness of those coins. This is not that. This is more like: WENN Digital will manage a centralized database of photo rights, and someone will stand off to the side shouting "blockchain!" occasionally when it seems like people's attention is drifting.
Also, that chart in the NYT with all the Kodak-colored little boxes and arrows is buzzword comedy gold. Blockchain leads to Tensorflow because why not!
I was janitor at KEZI (a ABC affiliate in Eugene Oregon) and gave up and went homeless for a bit. My sister got me a room with her friend for a few months while I found a job in Portland. I had to find a job.
I had about 80 in cash so I had to cover job hunting and food with that. Not a easy task. So I stole a paper from a neighbor to look at the job listings. Great.. A temp listing and only a three miles away. So I can walk there. Fuck paying 2.50 for the bus.. That is two totinos.
So I am waiting after filling out a application. They basically have you sit there all day and call you if "day labor" is needed. "Labor Ready" if I remember correctly.
So I go out for some air and outside there is a weekly employment thing. I flip through and there is a promising ad. It is on 21st and Holgate near Reed College.. Way to far to walk. So fuck it.. I will risk the 2.50 to take the bus there and hope for the best. In my mind I was thinking job I will probably not get or 24 packets of ramen.
The job was at Qualex. Basically Kodak. We did all the film possessing in Oregon. And yes.. I got hired.
I worked in the digital room. Which was basically turning digital images upright and burning CD's. Processing thousands of images a shift. Calling the police when we hit kiddie porn, processing the images from murder scenes. The cops used us. So many suicide photos. They did not prepare us for this. Yes, suicide with a shotgun is possible. That was my Monday.
I was fired because of 9/11. I went to work on 9/11 and there was a note on the time machine spouting shit about "respect" and "mourning" and that we didn't need to come in. Which is bullshit. We didn't need to come in since nobody wanted film developed that day. And a call letting me know before I spent 90 minutes on the bus would have been fab.
So the next day it was all cool and during lunch I bitched. Shocker. After I said they didn't have us work because there was no work my card I used to clock in stopped working.
https://www.metafilter.com/172026/AI-Generated-Fake-Revenge-...
Forget copyrights, market this as a way to address Fake News.
If anything, the transaction rate limits of current blockchain technology seem like they'd be hugely limiting for this application...
Side note I see no reason to use pow for this application, pos seams like a more appropriate security tradeoff
What is needed is a system on a chip that immediately encrypts, signs and uploads any image (or video or audio) shot from the camera to a distributed public record, like a blockchain or IPFS. That gets you a creation timestamp and an unaltered source image that can be verified later if the author releases the decryption key.
Without having a SoC doing everything at once, any image that gets encrypted is already suspect. I’ll be surprised if devices like this don’t start appearing over the next few years, either for adoption by journalists or forced onto police. Apple is in a good position to do this with their devices, since their t2 chip is already managing authentication and the camera + microphone.
Artists pay Kodak to register their image with the blockchain, and Kodak has a mechanism to crawl the web to find images violating this blockchain registration.
Okay, great, but why would anyone want to mine their blockchain?
If you want to use tokens as store of value or medium of exchange, go use something like Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.
But maybe they do and thought "Well, a blockchain is a good idea to track photo ownership AND people make mad bucks with crypto currencies at the moment, we can offer a something that has to do with photos and make big money on the side"
The actual use properties of tokens/coins/blockchains aren't any different.
It just didn't involve the term, "Blockchain" :)
Kodak finally decides they aren't going to be late for once and this is what they choose to get in on. Classic
A media company just needs to run the software on their systems and manage a subscription on usage. Probably some typical SaaS subscription models would work.
And the SaaS then gets the photographers paid. This doesn't need blockchain at all for the currency aspect, just to ensure proof of owner on the images. There are probably other ways to do that though.
What you're talking about is keeping honest people honest, so proof of work is just waste, a central DB and a billing system is fine for that.
1. Registration of an image's IP rights is automated.
Users will be able to claim the IP of images which they do not own, and use the system to fraudulently siphon payments from the true owners. KodakCoin would be enabling and cooperating in selling fraudulent IP licenses.
2. Registration of an image's IP rights is not automated.
If every image needs manual human intervention to be registered, not only is this not a decentralized system, but the costs to administrate the system will scale directly proportional to growth. Unless the average image generates more profit than the cost of human administration needed per avg image, the more popular KodakCoin becomes, the faster it loses money.
Some respect can be given to those that find many greater fools, take their money and pull off a classic scam, e.g. the Tether incident, brilliant in its crookedness.
However this Kodak effort is a joke. Kodak are not in master scammer league and they have an inflated ego regarding their brand worth yet at the same time shaming that brand quite badly.
It is as if it is a parody told to a boss that didn't do deadpan, maybe German was the first language. I know people are gullible however:
Kodak's January 9, 2018 announcement of KodakCoin and the KodakOne was accompanied by its announcement of the Kodak Kashminer cryptocurrency mining system. The Kodak-branded "Kashminer" rigs would be available for two-year leases and allow owners to mine for cryptocurrency, a focus in Kodak's currency pivot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KodakCoin
They are having a laugh.
However it is definitely 'with' and not 'at' for everyone else that learns of this. Have they gone mad? What next, pivoting into homeopathic remedies? Rhododendrons or KodaTulips?
But judging from the ridiculousness of the diagram in the article, I feel like this is not so well thought out.
I'm not sure why Kodak didn't piggyback of an existing blockchain like Ethereum.
This will be built on top of Ethereum.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1515139/000149315218...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/kodak-apparently...
"As investors seek to capitalize on the popularity of currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, a number of struggling companies have reversed their fortunes, at least temporarily, simply by adding “blockchain” to their names or announcing a new cryptocurrency venture unrelated to their previous line of work. (The most notorious example is Long Island Iced Tea Corp., a beverage company that tripled its value overnight after it rebranded itself “Long Blockchain Corp.”)"
If all your blockchain is, is something akin to a decentralized database using UUID's, then you don't need a blockchain.
http://imaging.kodakalaris.com/professional-photographers/ph...
Kodak Alaris and Eastman Kodak are separate companies.
Disclosure: I'm employed by Kodak Alaris.
https://www.kodakalaris.com/en-gb/about/press-releases/2016/...
Eastman Kodak is also, as per that press release, going to bring Ektachrome movie film to market for their Super 8 camera.
I personally work in the Kodak Alaris division which makes Kodak branded (and now also Alaris branded) document scanners.
EDIT: to clarify that it's still photography film that Kodak Alaris sells under the Kodak brand.
if I don't post on HN for a while....you know why
If parent sold puts, well, maybe they should stick to S&P index funds.
Whatever happens, a lot will be learned from this initiative.
Those April puts I bought are looking better every day.
Nevertheless, despite what Kodak's CEO naively implied, infringement is NOT a photographer’s greatest problem. I can state that fact authoritatively, with decades of experience in the Commercial Photo marketplace, including behind the camera, with both empirical experience and having executed the most extensive customer development exercise ever seen in this industry.
Blockchain (in photography) is a FEATURE, not a business. But for the sake of argument, let’s say that it IS the major problem. In that case, if you are a photographer who has discovered your copyrighted photograph has been infringed (whether you found out via blockchain or another already-in-use technology), how do you expect to get paid, to be made whole? Do you suppose the process will be any easier, or different, just because of blockchain? Isn't that Kodak's rationale for its foray into blockchain?
An infringer, once discovered, will most likely ignore your payment demands, irrespective of whether or not you can prove copyright ownership. (Copyright ownership is implicit , anyway.) You have little or no legal recourse because it costs too much for most photographers to hire a lawyer to sue the infringer. The only way a lawyer will take your case on a contingency basis is if you have already filed a FEDERAL COPYRIGHT REGISTRATION. Registration is the key to the courtroom. It mandates a $150,000 statutory fee — i.e., backed by federal law — for each infringement of each individual use of a photograph. Now, that's a deterrent!
There is nothing in Kodak’s or anyone else’s blockchain business model to account for getting paid by copyright infringers. Moreover, no wannabe player in this game has put forth a business model that will attract PROFESSIONAL photographers to contribute their content to the stock photo pipeline in the first place.
How do I define "professional" you ask, and why is that important? Simple: any photographer who has already been trusted & hired by major brands & media companies to shoot commissioned jobs. That excludes about 99% of every contributor to the stock photo pipeline. But pros are the photographers from whom buyers want to license content because, right now, they complain that content sources are stale, bloated, and overused. (That's a whole 'nother topic.)
But there is a BIGGER reason why blockchain is a dead end — AS A BUSINESS, not a feature — specifically in photography. As it represents a “distributed” model, blockchain antithetical to the idea of a centralized source of curated content — the very kind of content Enterprise buyers demand. From the contributing photographer's pint of view, it gives them no individual market reach; no connection with customers. As for allowing photographers to set their own prices . . . HA! That IS their biggest problem. They have no idea how to do it. Blockchain may work in a consumer-retail marketplace, but not Enterprise. And Enterprise is the larger segment in Commercial Photo, albeit grossly underserved.
By "Enterprise" I specifically exclude the market currently served by Getty Images, Shutterstock, and Adobe Stock et al., which is comprised of shopkeepers, freelancers, and startups, all looking for cheap pictures to fill up their Web sites. But if your are one of that ilk of photo vendors, your business model is pile 'em high and sell 'em cheap. That means you have to sell the same picture over and over again at radically low prices to MANY DIFFERENT BUYERS to hit your revenue projections. But that's bad for buyers with a brand identity to protect. (There are a number of other, equally important reasons.)