Skip to main content

Tracking footage across derivative and aggregated works

In the last article (Film Finance: the barrier to open filmmaking?) I outlined three three methods of funding open video: reduce the costs, pre-load the funding before release, or develop new rights model and funding approaches. In this last option one approach in particular opened even more possibilities – is there a way to track media and associated rights metadata as it's re-used between different sources? How to make sure that when the Daily Mail features a clip of your video they a) have your permission and b) pay you whatever your fee is. It seems there's quite a few people discussing how this may be handled with a 'distributed ledger', ie a public and open rights database.

Smart contracts for rights

To break this down:

  1. Navigating the gap between Creative Commons non-commercial and commercial content is a complex space, especially when creating derivative works made up of multiple assets each with their own rights owners and licenses. Technically sharing a CC-by-NC image on a webpage with an advert is breach of license, but there's clearly a huge difference between an individual's blog and an ad-funded broadcaster.
  2. Rights databases around such assets seem suited to a distributed ledger because it avoids creating an institution to administer a database, and instead establishes a protocol for people to add meaningful metadata to assets they have created.
  3. Every filmmaker has excess footage, tens, hundreds or thousands of hours sitting on a shelf – and may be more inclined to share these if they knew that a) commercial exploitation was prevented other than under b) specific sales conditions.
  4. Digital contracts using rights description languages like ODRL (Open Digital Rights Language) could allow those conditions to be established (for e.g. “fine for use in film for TV, not available for commercials other than for non-profit organisations”). They also can provide a chain-of-title, allowing anyone who wishes to use that footage to pay a share of their income proportionally to the creators involved.
  5. Digital contracts potentially allow these rights to then be aggregated, for e.g. a ten minute film made of seven copyright owners work may inherit the non-profit streaming conditions, but to be sold to specific platforms would split the fee appropriately.

So a process could go something like this:

  1. Filmmaker shares an asset, e.g. an interview with 'Thomas E. Kurtz' (co-developer of the BASIC programming language). It’s released with a variant of the Creative Commons non-commercial (CC-NC) license.
  2. This license, and related metadata (author, year, format, keywords, length, etc) is linked with a video fingerprint of the film and stored in a ‘distributed database’ or ‘ledger’.
  3. Another filmmaker uses this asset in their film, which then must too be CC-NC. However they are automatically allowed to apply exceptions to CC-NC following pre-set terms, for typically a fixed fee, or a share of the total sale price within minimum/maximum levels.
  4. Another filmmaker remakes the film five years later, with 50% new footage. The same conditions as before apply. However they don’t want too many people to remake their film commercially so they set a very high resale price on the footage they’ve added.

This workflow would create a market for creating assets and another market for turning those assets into sale-able films (and a further market too for re-creating those films).

The basis of this market in a distributed database opens the likely need for a distributed ledger, and token system to fund the ledger. Suddenly there's a coin-based market around that where proof-of-work could be linked to hours of original video that has passed some kind of quality threshold (legality / broadcast-quality sound/audio / originality / release-forms signed). Given the carbon footprint of Bitcoin mining and the snake-oil coin peddlers and evangelists I've had an aversion against distributed ledgers and cryptocurrencies since attending an early pre-ICO meetup for Ethereum at a pub in the City (tho had I put £100 in then I'd be able to put $1m or more into this film now!). But it's always been clear there are benefits to a distributed ledger: it is to living and breathing databases what open source is to closed source software; it limits power being monopolised so becomes easier to embrace early.

So having written this, I began to search for what systems already exist in this space, and there's a bunch – RightsChain and Content Blockchain to name two (there's Pixsy for images and Po.et for text. Content Blockchain has an accompanying standard, the International Content Standard Code. Clearly more research is needed, so I hope that alongside making this film (of which I've spoken little about so far!) I will try to interview some of the people behind these systems and get my head around how realistic or tech-fantasist they are.

And more important, perhaps, what are the risks? My interest is in what benefits can be unlocked for filmmakers, and how they can be protected from big corporate rights-stripping vultures not, what rights can be restricted by content IDs and auto-fingerprinting.