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Mediachain adds integrity layer to online content

We live in an age where online content often has no attribution attached, from songs to cat gifs and HD movies. Sharing content has become so ubiquitous and easy that ownership information can be quickly lost and hard to track. It then becomes effortless to replace that information, compounding the problem further.

We live in an age where online content often has no attribution attached, from songs to cat gifs and HD movies. Sharing content has become so ubiquitous and easy that ownership information can be quickly lost and hard to track. It then becomes effortless to replace that information, compounding the problem further.

To tackle this problem, Denis Nazarov and his co-developers have created not just another service but a protocol, a unified format that allows emerging decentralized applications to use the same set of shared file types and data formats.

“The need to preserve metadata such as attribution is at odds with the desire to spread media as quickly and widely as possible,” states Denis Nazarov, Co-Founder of MediachainLabs. “The latter always wins because it’s easier and doesn’t require special opt-in behavior like a caption or a link to the author page.”

Mediachain is an open-source, distributed metadata protocol for cataloging content. It’s function, according to co-founder Jesse Walden, “is to make the images and information from each organization interoperable and discoverable in a decentralized system with no central authority."

MediachainLabs logo“Mediachain is a decentralized media metadata protocol that allows parties to make cryptographically signed statements about creative works. Those statements can then be looked up using an instance of the media itself.”
— – Denis Nazarov, MediachainLabs Co-Founder

Platforms using the new protocol will save a trail of metadata about the content’s history, including a complete line of ownership. They can also store other types of data, like email and bitcoin addresses.

The Mediachain protocol also offers a reverse-query to search for creators. Tipping the bitcoin address or sending an email to them then becomes easy.

Mediachain accomplishes this by allowing websites, platforms, applications, and other submitters to cryptographically sign units of content, with any additional information.

“With Mediachain, our mission is to create world’s largest open media metadata database to preserve information about creative works. We believe this will empower creators by preserving their attribution, allow consumers to have deeper interactions with media, and developers to build applications that reward creators directly.”
— – Nazarov

While centralized platforms have attempted something similar, they typically rely on a first-come-first-serve process. “Systems that privilege ‘first to file’ authorship claims exclusively cannot meaningfully incorporate the billions of existing works, and create unhealthy pressures for plagiarism and false claims, harming less technically savvy users,” states Arkadiy Kukarkin, a Mediachain Labs developer.

Mediachain approaches this problem with what is described as ‘perceptual resolvers,’ that can query Mediachain’s universal media library for a match at the time of submission. It doesn’t matter if the original image has been cropped, filtered, or edited in some other subtle way.

“The resolver takes the photographs from each organization and queries Mediachain for a match, returning a canonical identifier for [the content],” explained co-founder Jesse Walden. “This visual query is possible using perceptual fingerprinting technology — similar technology is used by Shazam for audio and Google Reverse Image Search for images.”

“There is a historical pattern of the media industry betting on closed systems again and again—dating all the way back to AOL vs. the open internet — and losing. We can do better this time.”
— – Jesse Walden, MediachainLabs Co-Founder

As Mediachain is a protocol, any online content can be cataloged for free. New media can be automatically added as soon as it resides on a system running a Mediachain application. Without any human interaction, it can take whatever metadata is available in the environment and attach it to the content.

The developers behind Mediachain have already made a good start by indexing more than two million images, generating metadata records for each. The Museum of Modern Art, Getty Images, the Digital Public Library of America, and Europeana have all had large chunks of their content indexed in Mediachain recently, proving it can scale.

“If two parties have information about the same creative work,” explained Nazarov, “the reconciliator layer of Mediachain automatically links the two statements using a single identifier while preserving attribution for all sources.”

Mediachain’s Metadata can often be too long for a blockchain, so it is designed to store all accompanying data in IPFS, a BitTorrent-like open file storage and addressing system.

A reference is then typically stored on the bitcoin blockchain, but could just as easily use another chain specified by the hosting platform.

"The metadata statements are cryptographically signed by the contributor, timestamped in the Bitcoin blockchain, and stored in IPFS. The statements can then be looked up via perceptual search using an instance of the media itself.”
— – Nazarov

Because Mediachain is decentralized, with no central point of control, Mediachain Labs acts as a custodian for Mediachain development. The custodian company received US$1.5 million in funding on Wednesday, from Barry Silbert and other Venture Capitalists at Andreessen Horowitz, USV, and RRE Venture Capitalist firms.

The same group of investors funded OB1, which acts as a custodian for the decentralized marketplace Openbazaar.

“At Mediachain Labs, we are building the shared open data layer to enable the new generation of decentralized applications. We believe that the only way out of the incumbent-dominated internet is for emerging platforms to cooperate, leveraging open data and decentralized applications to distribute the ‘network effect’ across a community of creators, users, developers and organizations.”
— – Nazarov

When development is done, the team will switch its focus to convincing existing popular social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to adopt the Mediachain protocol. Revenue models come later, and the investors have given the team time to finish the platform with no distractions.

“We believe in a future of fully democratized self-publishing, but we also recognize that at the near horizon most entities publishing media and metadata will be organizations — of different scales (record labels, studios, collectives, archives, galleries, hosting services, media platforms, etc),” adds Arkadiy Kukarkin, Mediachain Labs Developer.


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