UPDATED 16:11 EDT / OCTOBER 31 2016

NEWS

Blockchain-powered image attribution engine launches to credit creators

Anyone who wants to find images from the Internet to use in social or other media has huge burdens: attributing the image to the creator and even making sure it’s OK to use it.

To solve that issue, blockchain-powered startup Mediachain Labs last week announced the official release of an open-source image attribution platform that aims to makes it easy to find the perfect image and give the original creator credit. The Mediachain Attribution Engine is designed to provide an indelible system for attribution so that once an image gets “out there” on the world wide web, it can always be traced back to its originator.

Using a data pool that the company began collecting at the beginning of 2016, users can search Mediachain’s library for the perfect picture or upload an image to have it compared to already existing media. In the latter case, if the Mediachain platform cannot find an exact match, it will suggest similar images. In this way, it is similar to the TinEye reverse image search engine.

Mediachain is currently able to identify over 125 million images from over 30 image sharing platforms. The goal is to reach over 1 billion images. These images are sourced from the public domain, Creative Commons and other platforms and organizations that support attribution such as Getty Images, The Museum of Modern Art and the Digital Public Library of America and Europeana.

To do this, Mediachain makes use of several different technologies: the Mediachain protocol stack, which includes a Graph DB to combine metadata with images, IPFS (the InterPlanetary File System) to store images and the Bitcoin blockchain to provide data verification and proof-of-publish.

Providing provenance to images on the Internet

In the art trade, the “authenticity, history and record of ownership” of a work of art is known as its “provenance.” The Internet now provides a way to store and share virtually any type of media, but it lacks a way to easily show provenance (or attribution) for that media. Using a well-secured blockchain, a data structure that can serve as a digital ledger of transactions, it is possible to publish publicly verifiable cryptographic proof that a record has been created, provide a way to validate that it has not been tampered with and show that it was added to the blockchain at a specific date and time.

“Mediachain is a collaborative federated media metadata protocol that allows parties to make statements about creative works,” the company said in its platform’s introduction. “The metadata statements are cryptographically signed by the contributor, timestamped in the Bitcoin blockchain, and stored in IPFS. The statements can then be looked up via perceptual search using an instance of the media itself.”

Investors from Andreessen Horowitz, RRE Ventures, Digital Currency Group and a few others funded the Mediachain project in early 2016 to make this open source platform possible.

Mediachain’s platform represents a basic use-case for blockchain technology for the public good. Artists and creators interested in submitting to the project can do so at Mediachain’s website. The technically minded can also get involved by visiting the GitHub repo and Slack channel.

Featured image credit: by ŠTefan ŠTefančík via Attribution Engine

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