

The creative economy, signed originals and blockchain technology - bernardlunn
http://bernardlunn.com/2015/01/15/the-creative-economy-signed-originals-and-blockchain-technology/

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anigbrowl
It's a good idea for licensing but there's nothing special about a digital
original because it's not aesthetically different from the reproductions. You
have a Picasso, you can put your nose up to it and stare at the brushstrokes,
take it off the wall and look at the back of the canvas, stick your elbow
through it and so on. You take an original Shakespeare folio, you can look at
the curve of his handwriting and the food stains on the corners and so on. a
blockchain-certified document is qualitatively different, but the experience
of examining it is not; it's texture-less and cannot even offer a sense of
intimacy-by-proxy.

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bernardlunn
nothing ever is quite the same in move from analog to digital, but yes it is
harder to see the use cases in digital

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anigbrowl
Thinking about it this morning while looking at some art I had made, I suppose
you could think of the original in the case of a Photoshop document that had
all the original layers, edit history and so on included in the file. But I'm
not sure I see them selling for large sums.

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patio11
We could call that technology "Bitcoin DRM."

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danboarder
Except it is informative rather than preventing copying. So people can freely
copy but won't have the certified 'original'.

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bernardlunn
That is interesting. Asserting "I created this" and having that validated, is
different from saying how I want to control that.

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danboarder
Yes it's a great idea, and in the OP article he asks "Is anybody working on
this?" The answer is yes - there is a proof of concept illustrated in this
article: [https://www.pirateparty.org.uk/party-magazine/who-made-
could...](https://www.pirateparty.org.uk/party-magazine/who-made-could-
digitally-registered-images-be-future-creators)

And others are working on this as a service for many uses, including signing
artwork, see BT Proof, for example:
[https://www.btproof.com/](https://www.btproof.com/)

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bernardlunn
thanks. I see one other attempt, covered in another HN thread - not yet
released though.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8854818](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8854818)

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samcassatt
Monegraph (Kevin McCoy) is working on roughly this -
[http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/09/monegraph/](http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/09/monegraph/)

