Podcast: KodakOne and Blockchain for Photographers
03/23/2018If you follow photography industry news, two words that may have caught your attention recently are “Kodak” and “cryptocurrency,” and the fact that they were in the same sentence might just have caused you to sit up and click. There was an outburst of opinion filling the blogosphere after the January announcement that KODAK and WENN Digital had entered into a brand-licensing agreement to launch KODAKOne, an image rights management platform, and KODAKCoin, a photo-centric cryptocurrency.
The worlds of cryptocurrency and blockchain, the distributed ledger technology supporting many cryptocurrencies, are arcane, but merging one of the most recognized brands in photography with these new platforms and adding into the mix a potential fix for the image licensing business brought not only a lot of opinion, but a good deal of confusion. On this episode of the B&H Photography Podcast, we hope to clear the air and to do so we sit with the principals behind KodakOne and experts on both blockchain technology and image-rights licensing.
We welcome Jan Denecke, the CEO of KODAKOne, and Volker Brendel, their CTO, to this discussion. We are also joined by attorney Andrew Hinkes, a professor at New York University and author of more than twenty articles on blockchain technologies and virtual currency, and Maria Kessler, the former president of Digital Media Licensing Association and an expert in stock photography and digital-image licensing.
Join us for this rousing conversation in which we get firsthand information on KODAKOne’s business plans, insight on how the blockchain will affect photographer’s interests, and a general sense of what we can buy with a KODAKCoin.
Guests: Jan Denecke, Volker Brendel, Andrew Hinkes, and Maria Kessler
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Host: Allan Weitz
Senior Creative Producer: John Harris
Producer: Jason Tables
Executive Producer: Lawrence Neves
3 Comments
enjoying the podcasts guys.....especially the Falkland/ Malvinas comments in previous podcast. that made it more annoying that Ireland is not listed as an European country with Kodak One 😟 we must be under UK......😫
This is interesting, but there is no legal cryptocurrency/blockchain framework in place to resolve image theft. The US Securities and Exchange Commission is cracking down on Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) because of the unregulated nature of cryptocurrencies. KodakOne may be helpful in identifying image theft, but legal prep work in registering copyrights is needed to recover money and probably, hiring a lawyer is necessary to recover value. If one lives in the US, the Infernal Revenue Service (IRS intentionally misspelled) will probably want you to report your cryptocurrency earnings, like it requires for long term and short term capital gains.
Instant Payment System: Criminals will be criminals. If there is a way to modify a blockchain image unviewable unless payment has been rendered, then that could be a method to combat image theft; but it would require a change to the JPEG standard to incorporate blockchain technology.
Invest in gold, it's safer than investing in cryptocurrency.
I will close with the IANAL acronym, I Am Not A Lawyer. But I see too many holes in KodakOne blockchain.
Thank you Ralph for your comments. Needless to say there are a lot of unanswered questions regarding blockchain, cryptocurrency and image rights, and we hope to revisit this topic in the future.