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?
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.
But judging from the ridiculousness of the diagram in the article, I feel like this is not so well thought out.
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?
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.
I'm not sure why Kodak didn't piggyback of an existing blockchain like Ethereum.
This will be built on top of Ethereum.