#if your ai depends on STOLEN ART to function

[ploompkin]

To follow up my previous reblog about the AI thing— I checked in my settings and legit, you have to ACTIVELY GO AND DENY Tumblr the right to STEAL your original art.

Anyways, it’s under settings, visibility.

This is a disgrace; blatant theft.

Who wants to also bet this refreshes itself with every update? Lol.

[brokenmusicboxwolfe]

Your photos are genuinely beautiful and show such amazing detail. Please just block and report these people sending those scam asks. Tbh, there is ones who sound completely convincing. My friend who lives in England and takes nature photos of the surrounding countryside, was contacted by someone who then conned them out of £250 using the exact same scam. The person seemed credible as their blog was a personal art and photography blog which had been in use for a long time, with a seemingly solid audience interacting with their work. We don't really know if it's an elaborate trap set up or the person was a genuine artist whose been enlisted to help con people for a fee. My friend is now locked in a war with her bank etc to get her money back. I don't know if there is measures you can take to report it and get your money back too. Genuinely if people want to donate money to you for your work then just keep it to Kofi because the scams are getting more complex and convincing. From now on don't give out your bank details or anything. If they're genuine just let them donate to Kofi and rigorously stick to that routine. I'm just so sorry this happened to you too 🫂

Thank you. Both for both saying you like my photos and the sympathy over what happened.

You are right about how convincing these cons can seem. In this case they even (apparently) used AI to create a believable WIP for the piece of art they were supposed to be creating. The blog was established and had realistic personal posts. When I realized I was probably being scammed I searched for the source of the art they had supposedly made, and discovered they had stolen it from Facebook (specifically a grandmother!) It looked completely real unless you dug.

If my brain hadn’t been so frazzled from life battering me I would have had the sense to check things out carefully. Also, normally I absolutely would NOT have sent money to them via PayPal. But my brain has been less than fully functional lately.

I NEVER give out my bank account info or anything I think is sensitive, but that wasn’t going to help in this case. They weren’t pick pockets reaching into my jacket but con artists tricking me into handing it over.

Yes, I feel stupid and embarrassed. Yes, the lost $100 has already changed what I can and can’t buy. But I am posting about it to warn folks.

See, the scam, for all the flourishes to make it believable, simply depends on the sucker (me) not knowing that when money is deposited into a bank account, it really isn’t “there” yet. Oh sure, it says it is there. The bank says you can spend it. And the first time I called the bank about it, they even said it was fine. BUT it turns out fake checks aren’t necessarily uncovered instantly, despite what you would expect in our high tech world. Days. Weeks. You can’t be sure, and when it bounces you, the victim, are the one on the hook because you are the only one there.

The scammer convinces you they are cutting you in on a share of the money from a painting based in your photo. They are very convincing, take their time, and show you the work in progress. Then, oops, the client accidentally sent all the money to you so could you please PayPal them their share. So a couple days you send it and….

Now I got lucky. Technical difficulties kept me from sending more than $100. And the delay gave me time to talk to someone. And talking gave me a chance to look at things again.

Of course, I called the bank. While the first time they dismissed my concerns, the next morning I got someone that took it seriously and made a proper report about it.

Basically, at this point, it looks like it is done from my end. The reporting is done. The phantom money has been removed form my account. I can’t do anything about the money I sent (and yes, I investigated it too), but no more money seems to be in danger and the bank doesn’t seem to be penalizing me (maybe because I reported it so quickly, rather than finding out when the check went poof?) I can’t really do more than I have done, except to warn others to take care.

And, yeah, from now on I will stick to just hoping for a bit of Ko-fi love now and then. (Maybe my Amazon wishlist too?)

Oh, and if any legit artist wants to us my photos for something, you send my the money vis Ko-fi and just tell me it’s thanks for being the source of inspiration. It would be much appreciated and an ethical choice, while not triggering my enemy alert system.

[tsaomengde]

Some Musings:

As I play again through Ghost of Tsushima, one of the most engaging open-world games of the past ten years (up there with Witcher 3 and Horizon: Zero Dawn), with one of the best stories in quite a while, I find myself drawn back to the whole now-mostly-settled controversy about "can games be art?"  We have, by and large, agreed "yes."  So I find myself reminiscing about the first game that inspired a real emotional response in me beyond "whee I have a lightsaber" or "hurr hurr things fall over."

The year was 2001.  Dad had just passed.  I don't remember how I came into possession of it - I think it was included as a freebie with a video card Mom bought - but I got this game that had come out last year, called "Deus Ex."  You play a nanotech-augmented man named JC Denton, working in the post-apocalyptic cyberpunk future for UNATCO, a paramilitary police force arm of the United Nations.  The world is being ravaged by a disease called the Grey Death, and there's only one cure, and it's only being given to the rich due to limited supply.  Your job is to get back a shipment of the cure from the NSF, a domestic terrorist organization that's stolen a bunch of the stuff.

That's the first, like, four to ten hours of the game, depending on how long you spend sneaking around and reading everyone's mail.  It culminates in you tracking down the NSF leader, a man named Juan Lebedev, only to find your brother Paul waiting for you in Lebedev's hangar!  Paul is with the NSF!  But why?  He insists you go talk to Lebedev.

Now, up until this point, you've had a pretty straightforward path.  Granted, you've been able to tackle the challenges in front of you in a number of ways - stealthily, with brute force, by talking and bribing your way through stuff - but you've mostly been going from point A to point B.  But now, you get onto Lebedev's plane.  You confront him.  He surrenders.  You tell him you're taking him in.  And then your partner, Anna Navarre, an older-generation cyborg, tells you to assassinate the guy.  Kill an unarmed prisoner.

And then the game just sat there.

I didn't know what to do.  For the first time in a video game, I'd been presented with an actual moral dilemma.  Jedi Knight had this thing where if you indiscriminately murdered civilians, you would get Dark Side points, and not doing that would give you Light Side points, but that's not a moral dilemma, that's "which set of Force powers and game ending do you want."

He's the guy you've been chasing, he's somehow turned your brother, but he's surrendered and unarmed.  Your partner is telling you to kill him.  But he says he knows why Paul betrayed your agency.

You can walk away, and Anna will kill him once you leave.  You can kill him yourself, and Anna will praise you.  Or you can kill Anna, and learn a *lot* more about the real shit going down behind the scenes in the game.

I'm prepared to argue that, 20 years later, all of the games that are obsessed with player choice and agency still owe Deus Ex, and specifically this scene, *everything.*  Here's two different versions of the conversation with Lebedev, one where JC only kills Anna most of the way through (warning, she explodes into some low-polygon meaty chunks), and another, where the player knows she's going to spawn in after the first part of the conversation, so they set a mine on the wall outside (starts at 3:20) and kill her that way.  She never gets a word in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mdc41byknCc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZO8DET8-vBk

I still remember this part of the game, 19 years after playing it for the first time, in perfect detail.  I tried to kill Anna, she whooped my ass, so I loaded a quick-save after she told me to kill Lebedev, planted a mine on the wall outside, shot her once to get her to chase me, and she ran into the mine and died.

Much, much later in the game, you're brought to the HQ of the Illuminati, who are a real thing in this world.  You can walk in, talk to the leader, Morgan Everett, and walk back out to advance the plot.  But if you steal a key out of his laboratory, and find the hidden door behind the mirror in his bedroom, that in no way are you expected or required to find, you stumble across a chamber where he's keeping the previous leader in cryo-suspension to preserve his health.  You also find a prototype AI, named Morpheus, and have one of the most compelling conversations in the history of video games.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b-bijO3uEw

Included are such gems as:

"The unplanned organism is a question asked by Nature and answered by death.  You are another kind of question with another kind of answer."

"The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God.  Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms."

And one of my all-time favorites, "God was a dream of good government."

To repeat this point: this thing is hidden behind a locked hidden door concealed past a mirror.  It's not *hard* to find, and by this point you're used to exploring every nook and cranny looking for stuff, but the developers were *totally okay* with the possibility of you just la-dee-dah-ing your way through this building and never experiencing this.  That makes the whole experience that much more amazing.  Just like with Lebedev, I still remember finding Morpheus and talking to him almost perfectly, 19 years later.

Thanks for joining me in my musings.  I don't have much of a point, here.  I just like sharing random thoughts after midnight.

[helenpattersoon]

How blockchain technology can be used to protect intellectual property

If you write, design or create any media that is protected by Intellectual Property (IP) law, you’re probably aware of how easy it is for your content to be stolen online. And if chasing down thieves isn’t hard enough, enforcing your legal rights as the owner of the content depends on demonstrating that you are the owner.

While copyright law protects your work, until now there hasn’t been a definitive registration system to prove ownership. But luckily, this is changing with blockchain.

Blockchain is the system that makes Bitcoin work. But more importantly, it is giving creative people effective ways to protect their IP rights like never before.

Intellectual property in the age of online —

Intellectual work is just as hard as physical work. By Daria V.

When you create just about anything—be it a song that is recorded, a piece of writing, a photograph—you own it. At least, that is what the letter of the law says. But when it is your word against someone else’s (say a thief’s), the lack of any official document or timestamp proving which version of the work came first makes copyright little more than a vanity.

If you were an inventor, you could go to the patent office for protection, but as a creative, there is no designated way for you to legitimize your ownership of your work prior to its publication.

And with the advent of the internet, the challenges associated with copyright protection have become larger. Now there is a gigantic repository of data online, and sifting through it by yourself just isn’t possible.

These days, just about anyone can download your work for personal use without your knowledge or consent. That beautiful illustration you spent weeks crafting? It’s probably ended up as some anonymous kid’s desktop wallpaper.

There might not be much you can do in that case, but when someone is using your IP for commercial purposes, you are in a much better position to track down the theft and get compensated. Now, a business probably isn’t just going to write you a check because they are using your work illegally, even though they are required to do so. This is because they know the burden is on you to prove ownership and enforce your rights. So getting paid for the use of your IP might require hiring a lawyer, and proving that you are owed money could turn into a lengthy, expensive process that—without any record of your copyright—you might ultimately lose.

With the advent of blockchain, the process of defending intellectual property has become much more streamlined by leaving no question as to where copyright belongs. So how does this work?

Blockchain and decentralized ledgers —

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin aren’t revolutionary because they are a form of digital currency. Electronic payment systems have been the norm since at least the 1990’s. Bitcoin is a novel technology because instead of banks or governments keeping track of ownership, Blockchain technology establishes ownership via a ledger that is open to anyone who uses the system.

Bitcoin is most known application that runs on blockchain. By Monkeii

This is called a Decentralized Ledger, and Blockchain could be referred to as ‘Decentralized Ledger Technology’ (DLT). Fancy words, I know. But the end result is a system that is very hard to corrupt, and makes it easy to record the ownership of just about anything. Like your IP, whatever it might be.

DLT, or blockchain, functions by creating ‘blocks’, which hold unique data. In this way, it is a lot like a traditional record keeping system. But unlike the ledger systems of days gone by, blockchain’s ‘blocks’ are kept on different server systems all over the world.

One of the big advantages that blockchain offers for any field is the high level of automation it delivers, and the immutability of the ‘blocks’ once they are created. This means low costs, and a high level of reliability as far as proof of ownership goes.

No system is perfect, but blockchain based IP rights enforcement is a huge step up from anything else that creators have had access to before. While big companies have teams of lawyers ready to defend their IP, small artists haven’t had many options when it comes to creating an indelible record of their authorship. Until now.

Using blockchain for copyright protection —

If you are wondering how Blockchain might be able to help you, there is a lot of good news coming your way.

Book cover design entry by Xagar85 for The Freelancers Roadmap.

Not only does Blockchain lend itself to enforcing legal rights, there are a number of companies that are working on ways to create payment systems that are almost totally automated.

If you want to make sure that your IP is protected by Blockchain based technology, look into the registration systems that are out there. One of them is probably a good fit, and will allow you a new level of protection for you valuable IP.

With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), scouring the web for IP that is covered by existing copyright law has never been easier. Bots can look for any instances of your IP on the web, and if they find unauthorized use, you can start talking to whoever should be paying you for your hard work.

This puts individual artists and creatives in a position to take control of their work, and make sure they are paid fairly for their creations.

The key to all these advancements isn’t the creation of new law, it is just making sure your IP is protected from the time of creation, and paid for by the people who use it!

Brave New Ledger —

Maybe you know someone who bought a bunch Bitcoins when they were worth a few dollars, and now they have a Ferrari and a beach house.

Photo by Samuel Zeller via Unsplash.

Be happy for them!

But the system that makes Bitcoin work is called ‘Blockchain’, and it has seemingly endless uses. Blockchain is just a new ledger system, but it has some incredible capabilities that no previous system ever had.

Think about all the lists there are in your life. If you own property, like a car or house, that record of ownership is recorded in a ledger.

Or if you have some money in a bank, that bank balance is recorded in, you guessed it, a ledger.

Up to this point in human history all the really important information has been kept in centralized ledgers. That is a really fancy way of saying that governments, or major financial institutions kept track of who owns what.

Today that could be changing, as Blockchain based ledger systems are much cheaper to operate, and are safer when it comes to unauthorized changes being made to the record that is recorded in ‘blocks’.

Bye bye bureaucrats —

In many ways, bureaucracy has been a necessary evil.

by Fi2 Design

The industrial revolution was possible because people who created good designs were allowed to profit from them. The same thing is more or less the case in the creative world as well, but when it came to the smaller players, they were put at a significant disadvantage.

It all has to do with the price of legal representation, and proving who owns the IP rights for a creative work. All of this meant a lot of people involved in the process, most of them working in some facet of the legal system.

Enforcing the letter of the law was a mostly human affair, but today, Blockchain based systems with smart contracts are on the cusp of changing it all.

While the people who were managing the legal system are getting put out of a job, the actual creators of the content are in a position to win big.

In order to benefit from this breakthrough, it is important to begin to register your work with a Blockchain based IP protection system. Much like the cryptocurrencies, participation makes the system valuable, so if content creators embrace a new way of recording their ownership, almost anything is possible!

Smart changes —

One of the advantages that Blockchain based IP registration offers creators is the ability to manage sales automatically via smart contracts.

Illustration by M.m.

Smart contracts allow you to propose terms of use for your IP, and then, interact directly with people who want to license or buy your creations. Imogen Heap recently released her song, ‘Tiny Human’ via a Blockchain based service called Ujo. This allowed her to interface directly with her fans, and offer them her work at the best possible rates.

Up to this point there have been many people in between an artist and the people who buy their work, but by using smart contracts and micropayments, the people who actually make music, writing and art get more for their efforts.

At first it seemed like the internet made it harder to enforce IP rights, but today, it looks like it could be the best thing that ever happened for content creators.

Getting up to speed —

The entire IP system is based on being able to prove your authorship.

Today creative people from across the world have a new tool to ensure they are paid fairly for their work, but you have to start to use the system if you want to benefit from it. Depending on what kind of work you create, there will be different options open to you.

Would you consider protecting your intellectual property using blockchain technology? Tell us in the comments below!

About the author: Admir Tulic is a blogger at CaptainAltcoin.com. In the online world, you’ll mostly find him nerd-discussing cryptocurrencies and bitcoin scaling solutions. In the offline world, he spends most of his time telling his friends he is starting going to the gym next week.

The post How blockchain technology can be used to protect intellectual property appeared first on 99designs Blog.

via https://99designs.co.uk/blog/

[pamelahetrick]

How blockchain technology can be used to protect intellectual property

If you write, design or create any media that is protected by Intellectual Property (IP) law, you’re probably aware of how easy it is for your content to be stolen online. And if chasing down thieves isn’t hard enough, enforcing your legal rights as the owner of the content depends on demonstrating that you are the owner.

While copyright law protects your work, until now there hasn’t been a definitive registration system to prove ownership. But luckily, this is changing with blockchain.

Blockchain is the system that makes Bitcoin work. But more importantly, it is giving creative people effective ways to protect their IP rights like never before.

Intellectual property in the age of online —

Intellectual work is just as hard as physical work. By Daria V.

When you create just about anything—be it a song that is recorded, a piece of writing, a photograph—you own it. At least, that is what the letter of the law says. But when it is your word against someone else’s (say a thief’s), the lack of any official document or timestamp proving which version of the work came first makes copyright little more than a vanity.

If you were an inventor, you could go to the patent office for protection, but as a creative, there is no designated way for you to legitimize your ownership of your work prior to its publication.

And with the advent of the internet, the challenges associated with copyright protection have become larger. Now there is a gigantic repository of data online, and sifting through it by yourself just isn’t possible.

These days, just about anyone can download your work for personal use without your knowledge or consent. That beautiful illustration you spent weeks crafting? It’s probably ended up as some anonymous kid’s desktop wallpaper.

There might not be much you can do in that case, but when someone is using your IP for commercial purposes, you are in a much better position to track down the theft and get compensated. Now, a business probably isn’t just going to write you a check because they are using your work illegally, even though they are required to do so. This is because they know the burden is on you to prove ownership and enforce your rights. So getting paid for the use of your IP might require hiring a lawyer, and proving that you are owed money could turn into a lengthy, expensive process that—without any record of your copyright—you might ultimately lose.

With the advent of blockchain, the process of defending intellectual property has become much more streamlined by leaving no question as to where copyright belongs. So how does this work?

Blockchain and decentralized ledgers —

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin aren’t revolutionary because they are a form of digital currency. Electronic payment systems have been the norm since at least the 1990’s. Bitcoin is a novel technology because instead of banks or governments keeping track of ownership, Blockchain technology establishes ownership via a ledger that is open to anyone who uses the system.

Bitcoin is most known application that runs on blockchain. By Monkeii

This is called a Decentralized Ledger, and Blockchain could be referred to as ‘Decentralized Ledger Technology’ (DLT). Fancy words, I know. But the end result is a system that is very hard to corrupt, and makes it easy to record the ownership of just about anything. Like your IP, whatever it might be.

DLT, or blockchain, functions by creating ‘blocks’, which hold unique data. In this way, it is a lot like a traditional record keeping system. But unlike the ledger systems of days gone by, blockchain’s ‘blocks’ are kept on different server systems all over the world.

One of the big advantages that blockchain offers for any field is the high level of automation it delivers, and the immutability of the ‘blocks’ once they are created. This means low costs, and a high level of reliability as far as proof of ownership goes.

No system is perfect, but blockchain based IP rights enforcement is a huge step up from anything else that creators have had access to before. While big companies have teams of lawyers ready to defend their IP, small artists haven’t had many options when it comes to creating an indelible record of their authorship. Until now.

Using blockchain for copyright protection —

If you are wondering how Blockchain might be able to help you, there is a lot of good news coming your way.

Book cover design entry by Xagar85 for The Freelancers Roadmap.

Not only does Blockchain lend itself to enforcing legal rights, there are a number of companies that are working on ways to create payment systems that are almost totally automated.

If you want to make sure that your IP is protected by Blockchain based technology, look into the registration systems that are out there. One of them is probably a good fit, and will allow you a new level of protection for you valuable IP.

With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), scouring the web for IP that is covered by existing copyright law has never been easier. Bots can look for any instances of your IP on the web, and if they find unauthorized use, you can start talking to whoever should be paying you for your hard work.

This puts individual artists and creatives in a position to take control of their work, and make sure they are paid fairly for their creations.

The key to all these advancements isn’t the creation of new law, it is just making sure your IP is protected from the time of creation, and paid for by the people who use it!

Brave New Ledger —

Maybe you know someone who bought a bunch Bitcoins when they were worth a few dollars, and now they have a Ferrari and a beach house.

Photo by Samuel Zeller via Unsplash.

Be happy for them!

But the system that makes Bitcoin work is called ‘Blockchain’, and it has seemingly endless uses. Blockchain is just a new ledger system, but it has some incredible capabilities that no previous system ever had.

Think about all the lists there are in your life. If you own property, like a car or house, that record of ownership is recorded in a ledger.

Or if you have some money in a bank, that bank balance is recorded in, you guessed it, a ledger.

Up to this point in human history all the really important information has been kept in centralized ledgers. That is a really fancy way of saying that governments, or major financial institutions kept track of who owns what.

Today that could be changing, as Blockchain based ledger systems are much cheaper to operate, and are safer when it comes to unauthorized changes being made to the record that is recorded in ‘blocks’.

Bye bye bureaucrats —

In many ways, bureaucracy has been a necessary evil.

by Fi2 Design

The industrial revolution was possible because people who created good designs were allowed to profit from them. The same thing is more or less the case in the creative world as well, but when it came to the smaller players, they were put at a significant disadvantage.

It all has to do with the price of legal representation, and proving who owns the IP rights for a creative work. All of this meant a lot of people involved in the process, most of them working in some facet of the legal system.

Enforcing the letter of the law was a mostly human affair, but today, Blockchain based systems with smart contracts are on the cusp of changing it all.

While the people who were managing the legal system are getting put out of a job, the actual creators of the content are in a position to win big.

In order to benefit from this breakthrough, it is important to begin to register your work with a Blockchain based IP protection system. Much like the cryptocurrencies, participation makes the system valuable, so if content creators embrace a new way of recording their ownership, almost anything is possible!

Smart changes —

One of the advantages that Blockchain based IP registration offers creators is the ability to manage sales automatically via smart contracts.

Illustration by M.m.

Smart contracts allow you to propose terms of use for your IP, and then, interact directly with people who want to license or buy your creations. Imogen Heap recently released her song, ‘Tiny Human’ via a Blockchain based service called Ujo. This allowed her to interface directly with her fans, and offer them her work at the best possible rates.

Up to this point there have been many people in between an artist and the people who buy their work, but by using smart contracts and micropayments, the people who actually make music, writing and art get more for their efforts.

At first it seemed like the internet made it harder to enforce IP rights, but today, it looks like it could be the best thing that ever happened for content creators.

Getting up to speed —

The entire IP system is based on being able to prove your authorship.

Today creative people from across the world have a new tool to ensure they are paid fairly for their work, but you have to start to use the system if you want to benefit from it. Depending on what kind of work you create, there will be different options open to you.

Would you consider protecting your intellectual property using blockchain technology? Tell us in the comments below!

About the author: Admir Tulic is a blogger at CaptainAltcoin.com. In the online world, you’ll mostly find him nerd-discussing cryptocurrencies and bitcoin scaling solutions. In the offline world, he spends most of his time telling his friends he is starting going to the gym next week.

The post How blockchain technology can be used to protect intellectual property appeared first on 99designs Blog.

via 99designs Blog https://99designs.co.uk/blog/freelancing-en-gb/blockchain-protect-intellectual-property/

[susaanrogers]

How blockchain technology can be used to protect intellectual property

If you write, design or create any media that is protected by Intellectual Property (IP) law, you’re probably aware of how easy it is for your content to be stolen online. And if chasing down thieves isn’t hard enough, enforcing your legal rights as the owner of the content depends on demonstrating that you are the owner.

While copyright law protects your work, until now there hasn’t been a definitive registration system to prove ownership. But luckily, this is changing with blockchain.

Blockchain is the system that makes Bitcoin work. But more importantly, it is giving creative people effective ways to protect their IP rights like never before.

Intellectual property in the age of online —

Intellectual work is just as hard as physical work. By Daria V.

When you create just about anything—be it a song that is recorded, a piece of writing, a photograph—you own it. At least, that is what the letter of the law says. But when it is your word against someone else’s (say a thief’s), the lack of any official document or timestamp proving which version of the work came first makes copyright little more than a vanity.

If you were an inventor, you could go to the patent office for protection, but as a creative, there is no designated way for you to legitimize your ownership of your work prior to its publication.

And with the advent of the internet, the challenges associated with copyright protection have become larger. Now there is a gigantic repository of data online, and sifting through it by yourself just isn’t possible.

These days, just about anyone can download your work for personal use without your knowledge or consent. That beautiful illustration you spent weeks crafting? It’s probably ended up as some anonymous kid’s desktop wallpaper.

There might not be much you can do in that case, but when someone is using your IP for commercial purposes, you are in a much better position to track down the theft and get compensated. Now, a business probably isn’t just going to write you a check because they are using your work illegally, even though they are required to do so. This is because they know the burden is on you to prove ownership and enforce your rights. So getting paid for the use of your IP might require hiring a lawyer, and proving that you are owed money could turn into a lengthy, expensive process that—without any record of your copyright—you might ultimately lose.

With the advent of blockchain, the process of defending intellectual property has become much more streamlined by leaving no question as to where copyright belongs. So how does this work?

Blockchain and decentralized ledgers —

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin aren’t revolutionary because they are a form of digital currency. Electronic payment systems have been the norm since at least the 1990’s. Bitcoin is a novel technology because instead of banks or governments keeping track of ownership, Blockchain technology establishes ownership via a ledger that is open to anyone who uses the system.

Bitcoin is most known application that runs on blockchain. By Monkeii

This is called a Decentralized Ledger, and Blockchain could be referred to as ‘Decentralized Ledger Technology’ (DLT). Fancy words, I know. But the end result is a system that is very hard to corrupt, and makes it easy to record the ownership of just about anything. Like your IP, whatever it might be.

DLT, or blockchain, functions by creating ‘blocks’, which hold unique data. In this way, it is a lot like a traditional record keeping system. But unlike the ledger systems of days gone by, blockchain’s ‘blocks’ are kept on different server systems all over the world.

One of the big advantages that blockchain offers for any field is the high level of automation it delivers, and the immutability of the ‘blocks’ once they are created. This means low costs, and a high level of reliability as far as proof of ownership goes.

No system is perfect, but blockchain based IP rights enforcement is a huge step up from anything else that creators have had access to before. While big companies have teams of lawyers ready to defend their IP, small artists haven’t had many options when it comes to creating an indelible record of their authorship. Until now.

Using blockchain for copyright protection —

If you are wondering how Blockchain might be able to help you, there is a lot of good news coming your way.

Book cover design entry by Xagar85 for The Freelancers Roadmap.

Not only does Blockchain lend itself to enforcing legal rights, there are a number of companies that are working on ways to create payment systems that are almost totally automated.

If you want to make sure that your IP is protected by Blockchain based technology, look into the registration systems that are out there. One of them is probably a good fit, and will allow you a new level of protection for you valuable IP.

With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), scouring the web for IP that is covered by existing copyright law has never been easier. Bots can look for any instances of your IP on the web, and if they find unauthorized use, you can start talking to whoever should be paying you for your hard work.

This puts individual artists and creatives in a position to take control of their work, and make sure they are paid fairly for their creations.

The key to all these advancements isn’t the creation of new law, it is just making sure your IP is protected from the time of creation, and paid for by the people who use it!

Brave New Ledger —

Maybe you know someone who bought a bunch Bitcoins when they were worth a few dollars, and now they have a Ferrari and a beach house.

Photo by Samuel Zeller via Unsplash.

Be happy for them!

But the system that makes Bitcoin work is called ‘Blockchain’, and it has seemingly endless uses. Blockchain is just a new ledger system, but it has some incredible capabilities that no previous system ever had.

Think about all the lists there are in your life. If you own property, like a car or house, that record of ownership is recorded in a ledger.

Or if you have some money in a bank, that bank balance is recorded in, you guessed it, a ledger.

Up to this point in human history all the really important information has been kept in centralized ledgers. That is a really fancy way of saying that governments, or major financial institutions kept track of who owns what.

Today that could be changing, as Blockchain based ledger systems are much cheaper to operate, and are safer when it comes to unauthorized changes being made to the record that is recorded in ‘blocks’.

Bye bye bureaucrats —

In many ways, bureaucracy has been a necessary evil.

by Fi2 Design

The industrial revolution was possible because people who created good designs were allowed to profit from them. The same thing is more or less the case in the creative world as well, but when it came to the smaller players, they were put at a significant disadvantage.

It all has to do with the price of legal representation, and proving who owns the IP rights for a creative work. All of this meant a lot of people involved in the process, most of them working in some facet of the legal system.

Enforcing the letter of the law was a mostly human affair, but today, Blockchain based systems with smart contracts are on the cusp of changing it all.

While the people who were managing the legal system are getting put out of a job, the actual creators of the content are in a position to win big.

In order to benefit from this breakthrough, it is important to begin to register your work with a Blockchain based IP protection system. Much like the cryptocurrencies, participation makes the system valuable, so if content creators embrace a new way of recording their ownership, almost anything is possible!

Smart changes —

One of the advantages that Blockchain based IP registration offers creators is the ability to manage sales automatically via smart contracts.

Illustration by M.m.

Smart contracts allow you to propose terms of use for your IP, and then, interact directly with people who want to license or buy your creations. Imogen Heap recently released her song, ‘Tiny Human’ via a Blockchain based service called Ujo. This allowed her to interface directly with her fans, and offer them her work at the best possible rates.

Up to this point there have been many people in between an artist and the people who buy their work, but by using smart contracts and micropayments, the people who actually make music, writing and art get more for their efforts.

At first it seemed like the internet made it harder to enforce IP rights, but today, it looks like it could be the best thing that ever happened for content creators.

Getting up to speed —

The entire IP system is based on being able to prove your authorship.

Today creative people from across the world have a new tool to ensure they are paid fairly for their work, but you have to start to use the system if you want to benefit from it. Depending on what kind of work you create, there will be different options open to you.

Would you consider protecting your intellectual property using blockchain technology? Tell us in the comments below!

About the author: Admir Tulic is a blogger at CaptainAltcoin.com. In the online world, you’ll mostly find him nerd-discussing cryptocurrencies and bitcoin scaling solutions. In the offline world, he spends most of his time telling his friends he is starting going to the gym next week.

The post How blockchain technology can be used to protect intellectual property appeared first on 99designs Blog.

[tyither-blog]

A New Day

“That's Lizardshit, Killroy”{1} I wasn't willing to accept the possibility of being the last of my kind, and any case I suspected I would get a message like this with a sentence as long as mine.

“There was plenty of time while I was down for something to come along and make the Telenet unfeasible, or to switch to a new system. Hell, I was out long enough for evolution to occur, considering our skills at genetic engineering.”

“And losing Telenet access could be the result of something as simple as being left out of the loop during a mandatory update to the security protocols. Which, I might remind you, is all but a guarantee.” I was trying not to think about those battlefield promotions, which painted a much grimmer picture. But I wasn’t ready to face that yet.

"Anyhow, we have more immediate problems. Can you detect our current location?"

[Negative, Sir. This dimensional frequency is not registered.] 

I pointed to the placard that had been in front of my exhibit, written in an unfamiliar language.“What does that say?”

[I am not able to translate this language, sir.]

“You cant translate? YOU can’t translate!?” I forced myself to calm down.

I was standing in what looked like a museum next to what looked like a destroyed exhibit. Somehow I didn’t think explaining that I WAS said exhibit would get me any traction with the local police force. Especially If I didn’t say it in a language they understood. "Record that and start taking language samples.” Yes, sir.

I ran out of the room filled with ancient sculptures, and entered what looked like a exhibition of portraits. No windows or doors. The next hall was filled with landscapes, and after that still life. Still no exit. I didn’t get a chance to look closely at them as I ran past, but I did notice that they seemed to be mostly realistic work.{2}

That was.. Interesting. Realistic work doesn’t usually have as much value for developed civilizations. It’s not that they don’t appreciate art, it’s just that  capturing the exact beauty of the natural world on canvas is not as valued in a society that had developed the photograph.

Past the still life’s I found a room that looked like a cafeteria, which mercifully had windows. From the look of the sky this was the first few hours before dawn. The window only had a primitive bolt-lock on it, and was easily opened from then inside. I then slipped out the window and ran like I was stolen.

15 minutes later I was off the grounds and running down a brick paved street. There were a few people there, and they looked at me with interest but not shock. From their reactions I gathered I looked different to them, but not so much as to be alien.  I spotted what looked like forest ahead- Was I on the edge of town? I headed to it; forests were easy to get lost in and I needed to, and I needed to hide an regroup. Looking for info could wait until I figured out why Killroy was having performance anxiety.

Why the hell was Killroy not able to translate? Killroy was an quasi-AI that interfaced with a telepathic network, the filter through which I was able to access the skills, knowledge, and experiences that the other Telenet users had provided access to.

Translating was quite literally the only thing Killroy actually did- taking the  information from the Telenet and translating it into something that my mind could understand and absorb.{3}

I gently slapped the palm of my hand against my cheek.

“Killroy, you don’t have Telenet access. Terminate all process and perform a self evaluation. When complete report your current capabilities.”

[Understood sir.]

After I had found a nice place between two conifer trees to hunker down in, an information screen popped up in my vision.

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Virtual A.I. Program K5L9-R0Y4-5

Current Status

Processing- Limited. Processing power used on voice interactive mode exceeded practical functioning guidelines- insufficient processing power remaining to have Diagnostic and Voice interactions functional simultaneously. Voice interaction s\disabled. Heads Up Display activated to reduce processing burden.

Identification- Online. Can cross reference information with  the existing digital encyclopedia to create dictionary definitions to previously encountered phenomenons.

Network- Offline. Network not found.

Transfer- Disabled. Security protocols out of date and unable to communicate with Telenet security central.  * User can enable with Override.

Translate- Partially Disabled. K5L9-R0Y4-5 does not have access to external processing power and local authorized processing power is not sufficient to complete high level translation. At present can only translate known languages. *User can enable full translation services with Override.

Placebo- Offline- Insufficient Mana. Allows manual control over biological systems. Biological systems currently running out automatic.

Detect- Partially Offline- Insufficient Mana. Allows gathering data about the surrounding magical and physical laws about the outside world. Lack out outside processing power prevents identification of previously unknown phenomena. Currently limited to known factors only.

Skills- Offline - Insufficient Mana- No access to Sanctum- No understanding of local physical or magical law.

*User has been promoted to Autarch. The following abilities have been unlocked.

*Override- User can Override security protocols.

*Authorize- User can authorize others as Telenet users, and set their degree of access.

*Install- User can give telepathic abilities to non-telepathic species via retrovirus. Requires the exchange of genetic information.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I need Translate online. “Overide- Enable Translate. Authorization Sargent Dvalin- passphrase ‘when moss gross on the river bed the dry farmer weeps’.”

Authorization level not valid.

I ground my teeth “Overide- Enable Translate. Authorization Autarch Bloody Dvalin- passphrase ‘when moss gross on the river bed the dry farmer weeps’.”

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Warning! Override will increase K5L9-R0Y4-5 processing power past virtual AI threshold and would trigger initial sentience. Once initial sentience has been determined, the Recognition of Intelligent life act will mandate you allow them to complete their development into a fully sentint AI. Warning! Without access to a  robust Telenet, awakened AI will have to pull all processing power from users brain- as AI development continues processing resources may become exhausted resulting in reduced functionality. 

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Dammit. A sentient AI was a pretty big deal. One that existed in my head was a bigger one. But knowledge was power, and I was powerless in this strange new world. I needed the ability to understand if I was going to start learning. Start surviving.

“Warning Acknowledged. Confirm Override”

1. Had Tyither been raised in a society that depended on cows instead of thousand-pound lizards as their primary source of fertilizer, this might have been "Bullshit."

2. Realistic is a relative term. In this case it is being applied as “an attempt to reproduce the appearance of the models as accurately as possible.” The fact that the models included members of the Ifreet, Hieracophinx, and a Wereabada races may detract from the realism for the less traveled viewer.

3. Downloading another persons life experience information into your brain without first reformatting it to match your personalized mental operating system is banned in every society that considers “gibbering madness” to be an unacceptable side effect to trying to learn how to play table tennis.