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Comment by jethro_tell | Hacker News Reader

It's not a bad idea but they got blockchain mixed up in it. Would have been better if they had just built a low cost subscription service with some embedding in the image a crawler and the weight of a corporate lawyer for enforcement. That's a service that a one person pro photog may be willing to pay for.

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That service actually exists and has for many years (e.g., Pixsy https://www.pixsy.com, DigiMarc https://www.digimarc.com/solutions/photography).

It just didn't involve the term, "Blockchain" :)

well, by the many years part I would assume it's not a bad idea then and there's no value add from the blockchain so guess they are late to that party as well.

Kodak finally decides they aren't going to be late for once and this is what they choose to get in on. Classic

Wouldn't an approach not emphasizing the corporate lawyer be better? Something where say a media company can just pluck whatever images it wants out of a repository and the software will infer a blockchain hash out of the image or metadata and then bill them accordingly for usage. Make it completely simple to setup and run so pirating of images is actually harder to do.

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.

Well photogs don't need protection from paying customers and there are already ways to sell your photos. Where they really get screwed is when someone who's not paying uses the photo, then the 'corporate layer' sends a cease and desist or possibly a DMCA take down depending on the situation.

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.

Without the blockchain their stock doesnt go up 200%, and its all for nothing (maybe thats their perspective, idk)

Yeah could be, My guess is they've been late to the party on everything for the 25 years and someone conned them into showing up on time for this one and it turns out the parties a dud.

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