During the film festival in Cannes, Cinemarket, a movie marketing company from Berlin announced it would use the blockchain technology to create a transparent and secure online platform for efficient and safe management of the movie rights and other audiovisual content.
Cinemarket is already managing the copyright and licensing of the content it commercializes, but the company recently launched a platform based on the blockchain technology as an important value added to its portfolio. The movie marketing company does not work with movies for massive audience. Instead, Cinemarket acts as a curator and puts the emphasis on emerging directors. The use of the Ethereum blockchain network will allow the company to manage the decentralized and secure storage of contracts, licenses and transactions, without the risk of forgery or alteration.
Although the big cinema studios have well defined distribution channels for small marketers, which is a decreasing business, they also have distribution channels for online streaming providers such as Amazon and Netflix and the entire area is difficult for the small producers.
World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) issued a publication called “From Script to Screen: The Importance of Copyright in the Distribution of Films” in which it showed that the global cinema industry is in a profound metamorphosis, even though the financing and distribution methods change very slowly. The new technologies and new business models, the WIPO warns, present a challenge for the conventional models and create new digital distribution challenges that reach broader audiences at lower costs. The publication says: “The global film industry is undergoing a period of radical restructuring that is increasing opportunities for producers and distributors alike, while offering new challenges. Whereas traditional methods of finance and distribution continue to dominate, new business models and digital technologies are challenging those traditional models and creating entirely new distribution channels that can reach ever wider audiences at lower costs (both for production and distribution). One thing that does not change is that quality and creativity are prized and the business community is very often responsible for recognizing and nurturing these rare commodities. Part of that responsibility is properly documenting copyright transactions, giving credit to the authors and properly compensating all parties.”
Justly, in the sector of storage of the adequate documentation related to the copyright is where the blockchain technologies offers the most benefits, since the blockchain network of Ethereum allows to store the data related to the audiovisual content in a decentralized and secure way. The information about contracts, licenses and transactions is protected against forgery and alterations due to the cryptographic mechanisms.
There are numerous applications of the blockchain technology that are currently proposed or already realized when it comes to the protection of the copyright, as well as audiovisual content distribution schemes in which the authors themselves commercialize their creations.
