Another year has passed: 2019 closure notes and thoughts

Image heading by Diane Helentjaris on Unsplash

It has been almost four years since we started our project, and this is the third year we have been running actively the Rights Chain platform. During this time, we have met a lot of awesome people, authors, and creators of all kinds and with so many different talents. We attended different events, and not necessarily only directly copyright related, we met editors, producers, businesses and law representatives.

We learned a lot, and we are not about to stop.

Our mission is still “helping authors and creators protecting their creativity in the digital, single market”.

 Not an easy task. But someone must do it: we like the idea of being among the first ones who begun doing so and starting from the root of the problem.

Those, who create content.

At the beginning of the year 2019 we launched “rcRMS”, a business-oriented application that harmonizes the tracking of rights transfer between creators and businesses. It is the first business to business application we delivered that allows businesses as well as rights holders to keep track of who created a creative work, and who is owning the rights to use it. And yes, it holds the information in a blockchain registry to support data integrity over long period of time.

In 2019 the European Union approved the Copyright Directive for the Single Digital Market, also known as Directive 2019/790. This is a revolutionary move that, will bring some rule changes with online media and how copyrighted content is handled.

In 2019 we effectively dealt with “take downs” and “attribution requests” to platforms such as YouTube, Twitter and Reddit on behalf of our registered authors. I am afraid their interest was more into not having to deal with a copyright infringement cause rather than being concerned about author’s intellectual property. This is something we have been working on lately.

In the second half of 2019 we have been involved in talks with the music industry to talk about copyright and technology. This is something we are proud of, and a thank goes to Mr. Maurizio Picciotti who is currently head of the “music business development” at Rights Chain. We are proud and glad to be involved in such complex segment of the copyright industry. Whereas we are still in a preliminary phase of the topic, we expect to have some announcement by the first half of 2020. This is a thrilling news since we did not expect to get involved in this segment.

In the final quarter of 2019, we announced cooperation with new Media Partners we are happy to work with and develop our communication further. The newsroom of the institutional website has been entirely revamped and now contains the list of our media partners, media coverage mentioning Rights Chain or its staff, global news from the world about copyright and, last but not least, our events and projects.

We brought your problems with us.

We actively addended workshops and conferences to talk about problems content creators and authors are facing on daily basis. Unlike other participants, we didn’t make any assumptions: we brought real life experiences.

Your experience.

The Rights Chain platform is built with an “authors first” philosophy.

For 2020 I am happy to bring three major announcements,

During January 2020 we will be launching two new features of our platform: rcPatrol and rcSentinel. The application will keep track of author’s work usage on the Internet. Each author will have access to statistics on how his or her artworks are used over the Internet, automatically, and updated daily or weekly based on the subscription level of the user. rcPatrol will be available as beta version on the first quarter of 2020 and then released as stable feature available for subscribers since April 1^st 2020.

rcSentinel is an extension of the registration process that will check over the Internet (the very same way the described rcPatrol does) if an uploaded image has a match publicly available, or if there is a similar (or identical) work present in our database. This feature is developed to avoid accidental (or maliciously intentional) attempts of registration of works that could potentially belong to someone else. This feature will be delivered during the 1Q of 2020 and will be available on the platform as of April 1^st 2020 as well.

The rcPatrol and rcSentinel features will be available for images only at their first release.

During the 1Q2020 the platform will allow the registration of new file types such as videos, music files (mp3) and PDF files. Music and Video files registration will be available only to enabled users as a part of the music industry integration mentioned earlier. Books registration was a widely anticipated feature that has been delayed because of technical and legal concerns. As a side note of the “technical concerns” I am eager to say that the Rights Chain platform can digitally sign and attribute any file format regardless of the source and/or the size of the file. The mentioned concerns are merely functional, whereas providing a service where users have little or no benefit or advantage of the platform does not reflect the Rights Chain Vision.

By December 31^st 2019 rights Rights Chain closes with over 150 customers (authors and businesses) who registered nearly 2.000 artworks throughout our platform. Should the numbers seem funny compared to big platforms with millions of users, we like to remind that every subscriber’s identity of the platform is verified. This allows us to be reasonably sure that we won’t see someone claiming to be Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa’s” author stored in a Blockchain registry. Non the less, every author can create multiple aliases or pseudonyms to register his or her work with: it still represents a valid and lawful copyright deposit.

We met almost, if not all of you. One by one, and if we did not, we are going to do so, one way or another. And no, we will not come to ring your bell at home, we do not have your home address stored in our database (seriously, we can prove it). We also do not need it.

2020 is announcing to be a tough and intense year. A lot of challenges and effort is ahead of us. And we will face those challenges one by one.

On behalf of Rights Chain, I would like to thank all the Authors that believed in us, those who are already our honourable subscribers and those who, hopefully, will become ones.

All the people who supported the platform development and made this possible. All the content creators for our pages, who contribute to creating a first-of-the kind website collecting news and information on copyright: this includes all the columnists as well as all the graphic artists who create our mascots and custom designs that are slowly invading all content headers (and Instagram timeline). All our Media Partners for spreading the word and providing us with reliable and high-quality content to be shared among our website and social media pages.

All our Partners who are contributing to increase our knowledge and business within an industry that is still thinking it is the year 1886.

And last, but not least, all the family members who support (and tolerate) our moods and out-of-our-minds working hours.

With this note, I am happy to wish everyone who read these lines, a pleasant Christmas and a successful and fulfilling New Year.