Text | Xin Nan, Xiao Parker
On April 11, the image copyright incident of Visual China (stock code: 000681) occupying the first human black hole photo ignited public opinion about its image copyright industry. People in the industry are besieging Visual China in the name of copyright protection to grab commercial profits. The self-media people's "the world has suffered from visual China for a long time" has become the latest buzzword.
The Visual China incident directly hits the Internet’s piracy pain point. In fact, if you look at the incident indifferently, what is behind it is more thought-provoking. Original pictures have become an asset, and copyright awareness has gradually become the consensus of the industry. Confirm the rights of original content, and after it is sold to a centralized platform, it is prone to monopoly by giants, and copyright has become a good business for the giants to set prices freely and slaughter customers.
If the blockchain is added, what will be the difference in the copyright field?
Odaily found that among the 197 blockchain information service filings released by the Netcom Office, there are not many information services that apply blockchain technology to copyright deposit certificates.
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Use blockchain to help creators confirm the rights of original works
The Internet’s demand for pictures cannot be underestimated. According to statistics, the number of pictures used on domestic webpages exceeds 600 billion each year, and the consumption of pictures on major self-media platforms is 43 billion. If calculated according to the 5% genuine rate, the market size has reached 15 billion billion.
Odaily learned that Pixel Bee is an original content sharing community based on blockchain technology, focusing on copyright services and social networking. Pixel Bee is currently the first to enter the field of pictures.
PixelBee mainly wants to do two things:One is to use the blockchain technology to help the creators of the pictures to record the information of their works on the chain, and realize the non-tamperable deposit certificate; the other is to use the financial mechanism of the blockchain to help the creators obtain a fair All people who participate in its social platform will receive fair benefits.
PixelBee wants to use the above two services to attract original creators to its platform to share and confirm the rights of original works.
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(Certificate of Deposit provided by Pixel Bee)
This means that with the addition of the blockchain, original creator information such as who the picture comes from and who made the contribution will be publicly placed on the blockchain, and the deposit certificate cannot be tampered with and is permanently recorded.
"The evidence stored on the blockchain can be used as one of the important evidences in the judicial proof in case of infringement incidents in the future." The pixel bee team analyzed it in this way.
It has to be said that even if the blockchain provides creators with a credible information recording platform, image uploaders may still commit malicious acts such as pirated uploads. Then how to ensure that the initial uploader on the PixelBee platform is the original author himself?
In this regard, the Pixel Bee team stated that in order to ensure the accuracy of the information on the chain, Pixel Bee has added a verification mechanism such as manual review before the chain, and manually screened and screened the original works uploaded by users. Once the phenomenon of pirated uploading is discovered, the pirate will be deprived of rights, and the pirate will immediately enter the observation period. Only when he continues to publish original works and performs well can he return to the platform. In addition to manual review, Pixel Bee also opened a reporting channel for pirated works.
As for the role of blockchain in depositing evidence, the PixelBee team also has a different view.
"Blockchain is a double-edged sword. The content stored on the chain can not only help the original creators protect their original works, but also permanently record the evil deeds of the perpetrators. One of the important evidences.” According to the PixelBee team, due to the open source nature of the blockchain, the code can be reviewed by a third party, and Internet courts in Hangzhou and other places have recognized evidence stored on the blockchain.
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Fair incentives, individual photographers can also benefit from creation
After the copyright returns to every creator, without a centralized platform like Visual China, how can creators earn money through their original creations?
And in the social field, users have always created huge profits for Internet content social platforms (such as Weibo, Douyin, etc.), but these profits have nothing to do with us, and they even face the risk of being betrayed by the platform (data privacy leakage) risk. The centralized platform is the ultimate profit harvester.
Returning the value generated by users on the platform to users and creators is also what PixelBee wants to achieve.
In the PixelBee APP, the team has introduced the financial mechanism of the blockchain, and both content creators and ordinary users can get incentives.
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(A screenshot of the application interface)
In PixelBee's point mechanism, the biggest highlight is to prevent cheating by designing "energy value" to provide an equal and real social platform. For example, each user can get an initial energy value of 100 points at the beginning of use. When he publishes content, shares and other operations, he will consume the corresponding energy value, and the energy value will recover a little every 3 minutes, which can prevent the brush Posts and other high-speed operations to brush coins.
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One month after its launch, more than 7,000 photographers settled in
The Pixel Bee team told Odaily that the Pixel Bee product has been developed for one year, and its APP was officially launched in March this year, and large-scale promotion has not yet begun.
Currently, the PixelBee platform has more than 8,000 registered users, about 2,000 daily active users, and the average usage time of users on its APP is about 30 minutes.
In fact, there are currently quite a few projects in the industry that cut into image copyright + blockchain. For example, big companies reported by Odaily are also exploring the market space in this field. For example, Baidu has launched its copyright service platform "Totem" , "Tu Ke" launched by 360 search engine, etc.
In such a highly competitive market environment, how can pixel bees break through?
"Big companies are providing assembly line services for rights protection, while we are doing community and providing copyright services. At this stage, we are a traffic portal sharing platform." The Pixel Bee team told Odaily that Pixel Bee wants to create a community sharing product with original content , but at this stage there is no plan to do explosive promotion.
Different from the copyright tool products launched by big companies such as Baidu, what PixelBee does is more like a product that focuses more on content socialization. PixelBee motivates content creators and consumers through the financial mechanism of the blockchain, and quantifies the labor value of social users.
"At this stage, before the product is polished, we will focus on product upgrades and user retention. For top users, that is, content producers, we will guide traffic through Fotor and Fotor's lazy design, and expect photographers and designers to spread word of mouth. For consumer users, we use revenue incentives to explore the value of social wealth creation.”
In Pixel Bee's vision, it wants to use blockchain technology to serve top users such as creators on the platform. After establishing a content ecology, it will then attract ordinary users. Until Q3 this year, content production will be Those who attract upward force. It said that among the current main users on its platform, 90% of registered users are original content producers such as personal photographers.
In order to increase user stickiness, the team also designed a discussion section such as Post Bar - "Circle" in its platform, so that content creators and ordinary users can find circles they are interested in.
The layering of content and user layering is also the focus of PixelBee's next stage. Pixel Bee said frankly that most of the users on the platform are users in the photography circle, and most of the original content categories are photography content.
In the next step, it will be extended to fields related to originality such as design, text, video and design. In the design category, PixelBee will use the resources of Fotor, a photography and image processing platform for its original project. Team designers and outsourced designers on the Fotor platform update thousands of templates every week, and this group also has a strong demand for proof of original works.
The main business models of PixelBee in the future are:
Relying on the gallery sales of smart contracts, it provides a decentralized gallery trading market for the demanders and providers of pictures. Solve the problems of opaque division of photographers' pictures sold by traditional photo galleries and lengthy payment cycle. PixelBee’s smart contract-based gallery transaction will upload all transaction information to the chain, and creators can get a share after completing the sale, and ensure openness and transparency;
After the copyright is uploaded to the chain, PixelBee will provide creators with copyright monitoring and follow-up rights protection services.
PixelBee's team size is about 30 people, and most of the team members are from the Fotor team. Project founder Duan Jiang has more than 17 years of research experience in the field of digital image research, and is also one of the founding members of the photographic image processing platform Fotor.
