For many content creators, managing their digital art and images over several platforms has always been a frustrating experience. IPStock aims to revolutionize this market; it offers a visual content registry on the blockchain, along with a license management system using smart contracts.
Want to Sell Your Images? Good Luck.
Many talented individuals around the world employ their photographic and graphics creations skills as a source of income. Photos and drawings can be uploaded to stock image sites such as ShutterStock or GettyImages, where interested individuals and organizations can purchase them for commercial use.
However, it isn’t that uncommon for artists and photographers to find their work plagiarized, or used without permission, on a website or a blog. They often don’t have a way to fight back, since the legal fees and procedures involved are just not worth the effort.
Even if a creator somehow manages to avoid any copyright issues, their income might also be significantly lower than expected. Current stock image marketplaces can charge up to 70% in fees, meaning that both consumers are suffering from overpayment, and artists are barely getting paid at all.
This means that creators not only lose money due to copyright infringements; only a minuscule amount of the small portion that is purchased legally will ever reach them due to exorbitant fees.
IPStock – Providing New Opportunities
By providing a decentralized blockchain marketplace for stock images, both consumers and artists have a lot to gain. As a result of using a more transparent and open platform, content providers will not only earn more royalties; they will also be able to manage and protect their copyrights through a single cloud solution.
IPStock democratizes the digital content market by virtually eliminating intermediaries and ensuring that the whole process is risk-free and transparent. In turn, this will lead to accelerated development and growth of the market.
Consumers can also ensure that they are purchasing legal and original content with a transparent history and a variety of options. By connecting consumers, content providers and registry agencies, time and money can be saved when building content databases. Customers will have the ability to see a complete transaction history, with flexible options to manage one’s license, royalty and subsidiary rights. By solving the copyright problem, IPStock will revolutionize the entire global stock images market, which includes photos, illustrations, videos, and other visual content.
IPStock also aims to create a new segment in the stock photo market. The role of “Content Buyers” will be made available through IPStock – participants that will be able to buy out individual copyrights from its original authors. This will significantly change the copyright market landscape by increasing the copyright market capitalization and making it more interesting for the artists.
Need Content? Use IPS
IPStock is a well-established content platform founded in 2015, partnered with thousands of users, content providers, and buyers. The project was launched in Switzerland with the support of Fongit – a Swiss incubator of innovative startups with over 25 years of experience.
IPStock will be launching the IPS token – a utility token used exclusively to pay transaction and service fees on the blockchain-based IPStock platform, which already has a working prototype. IPS tokens will also be used as a means of exchange in copyright smart-licenses; the increase in high-quality content on the ecosystem will lead to an increase in demand for the tokens.
The company aims to enable a smart-contract based marketplace to buy and sell copyright licenses on the blockchain before the end of 2018; the smart contracts will utilize the IPS token, based on the ERC20 standard. This means that the system benefits all participants by being completely transparent and automatic, with minimal fees.
The IPS token presale has already started; it will end on February 28th, 2018. Participants will receive up to a 30% discount on IPS tokens during the presale – up to one-third of the available tokens will be sold during this period. IPStock aims to sell up to a maximum of 30 million IPS tokens at a price of 0.00125 ETH per token – the ICO will commence on March 1st and conclude on April 30th.
For more information about IPStock, please visit ipstock.com.
What are your thoughts on IPStock’s platform? Can blockchain technology help protect the intellectual property rights of content producers? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
Images courtesy of IPStock, PxHere
