Media & Entertainment SIG

The Media and Entertainment Special Interest Group (ME-SIG) will bring together technical, academic, and industry-related expertise in order to solve long-standing problems in the creation, fair distribution, and legally appropriate attribution of media assets (film, television, e-books, audiobooks, hi-res gallery or museum images, photojournalism, games, e-sports, and so forth).

The group’s charter can be found here and all related contacts, together with one-click subscription, are aggregated here. 

Mission and Goals

The ME-SIG will use decentralized, permissioned HL blockchains to discuss and build ​user-friendly​ apps that respond to the relative disorder of permissonless environments, where artists’ interests are significantly harder to safeguard.

Following comparative analyses of the technical challenges (and hypothetical solutions) facing filmmakers, musicians, novelists, poets, photojournalists, etc., these DLT apps/dapps will be created for content-creators and their publishers, irrespective of location or socioeconomic status. This implies a focus upon UX/UI concerns over command-line tools, all in the name of access and inclusivity.

Proposed Scope for a ME-SIG

The ME-SIG will focus on the application of Hyperledger DLTs to media-specific and entertainment use cases. Such activity will automatically foreground topics such as decentralized metadata, digital distribution, copyright protection, royalty payments, value chains, NFTs (non-fungible tokens), tokenized content, counterfeit reduction, and registered digital ownership. By logical extension, these same themes will lead to real-world scenarios or solutions for cinematic, literary, audiovisual, and photographic publishers, to name but four.

As with other SIGs, so the ME may well lead to sub-groups/sub-domains.

Following the established activities of the Social Impact and Trade Finance SIGs, the TME group can hope to:

• Collaborate with other core Hyperledger working groups and project in the areas of architecture

           —performance and scalability identity
           —smart contracts
           —and integration

• Build user-friendly DLT ME applications on HL, focusing on UX-UI goals over command-line tools alone, thus simplifying the workflow of HLF—for easier adoption by both artists and arts-related communities

• Research different protocols—to build standardization across different parties and projects

• Identify related reference architectures (business/integration or technical/infrastructure)

• Work with businesses and non-profit or NGO communities alike

• Share stories of civic success, failure, opportunity, and challenge

• Encourage the equal involvement of both early adopters and student newcomers, looking to examine careers beyond the (barely existent) academic job market.

A Concrete Project: Track & Trace, Play & Pay

The original proposal for the ME-SIG sketched the involvement of HL(F) in media and/or entertainment initiatives across two periods in recent history: (1) the initial forays of 2017-18 and (2) the more current events of 2020-21. The same text proposed, at least implicitly, that two barriers impede the uptake of DLT and permissioned blockchains in general by the general public. The inclusive ethos of HL as open-source technology is sometimes hard to promote, either because (1) it becomes part of proprietary backend engineering or because (2) HL itself involves a steep learning curve for average coders (in both senses of that adjective).

Prohibitive degrees of secrecy and complexity, whist significant obstacles thus far, are nonetheless easily surmountable with teamwork. 

In an initial post for the SIG, Philippe Rixhon of UCL’s Centre for Blockchain Technologies sketched a laudable—and workable—trajectory for the SIG, one to improve the visibility and employment of HL tools by the public. He suggested collaboration on the following: 

UX/UI aspects of an open, public, and distributed register of rights – all in the name of access and inclusivity. These aspects relate to entries and queries. They will rely on DLT, UX/UI, non-proprietary digital fingerprinting, affordable machine learning, other technologies and governance mechanisms. Creators must be able to access user-friendly intelligent metadata systems to protect and exploit their rights. They should not need a degree in intellectual property to do so… and even less a degree in blockchain protocols.

In the same spirit, it is therefore proposed that the ME-SIG develop—with a concrete project—the inclusive 2020 vision of Ashna Gupta​. Her example of music is translatable to other digitized narratives, be they e-books, photojournalism, e-games, or movies. “

Imagine this: a single platform where you can search for a song and uncover a record of every single player that has touched that song from inception to delivery. Every songwriter, producer, sound engineer, and everyone in between. Imagine a transparent revenue-sharing model that pays artists their fair share of royalties right away. Imagine a world of increased trustand accountability between artists and large media corporations.

There have been some moves in this general direction at IBM, where supply chain models could become the groundwork for entertainment platforms. Unfortunately, some of these sketched plans (often with the engineering of Horea Portuiu) are not afforded long-term support by IBM. They could (indeed, should) be worked up into a media delivery platform that:

• tracks the use of audio tracks or streaming movie files and relays “play and pay” royalties directly to the artists involved
• in the hands of journalists, the same platform can fight against fake news and simultaneously allow readers to subscribe directly to reporters, instead of entire newspapers or TV stations

A related structure would help to combat piracy, assure the provenance of media assets, bypass rapacious middlemen, lay the groundwork for a system of digital collectibles, and foster creative or journalistic local scenes.

David MacFadyen

Chair, ME SIG / Professor @UCLA 

https://www.davidmacfadyen.com