New site looks to curb illegal use of images

A new online service has been launched aimed at helping photographers and other digital artists who are fed up of seeing their work being used on the Internet without permission or payment.
 
The service is called Ascribe and its founders claim that it "allows you to truly own, securely share and steadily track provenance of digital art work." They note that protecting copyright and intellectual property "is a pressing issue considering 85 per cent of the photos on Google Image Search are stolen, or episodes of popular TV shows are leaked."

Ascribe works like an online registry, whereby users upload their artwork (photos, videos and so on) on its website for free. Each file is protected through a cryptographic certificate of authenticity and the company says it can track the chain of ownership and verify the title of digital property through its individual address.

Bruce Pon, Ascribe’s co-founder, said that "we are giving people the choice on how they want to control their IP, whether they want to give it away for free…or whether they want fair compensation for their copyright." He added that "we can give the copyright holders visibility, saying that IP in this sphere “is an urgent matter with massive financial consequences."

Pon noted that the art, antique and collectibles sector has around €50bn in turnover annually, "1.5 times bigger than the entire advertising market."

He concluded by saying: "Given that the Internet behemoths of Facebook, Yahoo! or Google all operate in the advertising space, you can imagine that the art market has significant untapped potential if you can replicate the model for digital art."

The online gallery cointemporary.com, which only sells using Bitcoin, is utilising Ascribe to authenticate and certificate all their art works. The company noted that the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) in Vienna recently bought the digital piece Event Listeners by artist Harm van den Dorpel, making it the world’s first museum to buy an artwork using its service.


Image courtesy of Shutterstock / tomertu