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> This has the advantage of /continuing to exist if Kodak goes away/, which is what you want as a rights holder.

If you mean the ecosystem can thrive without Kodak, then it sounds like you don't expect Kodak to add any significant value and I may as well use any immutable public record, of which there are already countless legally tested options.

If you mean that if Kodak goes away then the rights contained in their ledger stick around as a historical document, then it explains why they need a public and immutable ledger (and a decent third-party archival service), but it still doesn't require trustless or decentralized.

A blockchain works, in the same sense that calling a ride sharing service to take me to the coffee shop half a block from my house works. But I can just walk half a block instead. As far as I can tell, the blockchain doesn't allow Kodak to do anything that they couldn't have done 20 years ago if they had wanted, and it's much more complicated (and therefore much more expensive and error prone) than many other data persistence layers.

I'm suggesting your first scenario is the sane one for consumers. Kodak's value-add would be the tools to help you get the hash onto the immutable public record (and giving you control of the private keys that let you reassign ownership of this digital asset), presumably by integrating it into its cameras and photo-processing services, or providing a friendly Kodak-branded web frontend. If they go belly-up, you still have the keys and therefore can still transfer/prove those rights using somebody else's tools. You still want things to be trustless and decentralized because the whole point of such a system is to avoid costly records-digging to prove your rights in court. Unless you can continue to re-assign rights after Kodak gets bored of running its non-distributed, non-trustless sytem, you're back in the dark ages trying to prove things with photocopies of written contracts and so on.

You're right that they wouldn't be adding much value, and therefore couldn't extract much profit. That's why they're not doing that, and are instead issuing tokens.

>>A sane thing to do would be to piggyback on one the existing blockhains and their pre-existing hashing power.

That's what they're doing. They're creating an Ethereum-based ERC20 token and smart contract platform: https://www.bitsonline.com/introducing-kodakcoin-kodak/

Exactly. There have been a bunch of proof on concept websites that have been offering this service for 3-4 years now with very little pick up or interest from creators or consumers. In the end, there’s no reason it couldn’t be a simple open source drag and drop utility, or command line tool. They are offering a complicated solution to a problem that no one seems to think they have.