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Aussie Startup to Protect TV, Film Scripts against Piracy with Blockchain

Last Updated March 4, 2021 4:50 PM
Olusegun Ogundeji
Last Updated March 4, 2021 4:50 PM

A startup in Australia has launched a blockchain-based manuscript protection platform that will protect creative artists from having their ideas stolen before they sign their contracts.

Sydney-based Veredictum will take on piracy in the film and television industry starting with script distribution and a future focus on tackling illegal downloads. 

Veredictum Scripts is its first module of smart ownership and distribution platform for creative content producers to protect the ownership of your scripts, manuscripts and other source material for creative works.

According to the CEO of Veredictum, Tim Lea, the blockchain technology which facilitates bitcoin trading, has not been used in the space previously. Yet, the industry has problems that blockchain can solve. 

Mid-way through last year, he said a review was performed. It showed that of the top 1,000 performing videos on Facebook in the space of 30 days, 725 were stolen from YouTube.

“People download a video from YouTube, they strip it of all the producer content, and then put it up on Facebook as if it’s their own and it’s becoming a major, major problem in terms of copyright theft,” he told ZDNet.

He  added that the platform will not prevent the creative work from being downloaded but,  as an immutable record that cannot be changed, can prove that a particular film script was registered on a given date if an issue crops up in the course of law.

“The problem is the producer gets nothing because they get typically get 55 percent of the advertising revenue and then share revenue with Google, so if the content is stripped and used elsewhere, they get nothing,” Lea said. “It’s a major problem in tandem with film piracy, which is an area that we are very driven towards.”

Works are stored for security on Veredictum servers. Only the owner of the work can access to the original file by using the latest security technology by inserting a 6-digit code sent to your smartphone (called 2 Factor Authentication). Veredictum confirms who has looked at a document and when immediately someone accesses a script it registered to the blockchain. This presents the writer with some protection should the idea be stolen.

“Piracy is our big, hairy, audacious goal. We want to reduce piracy by 80 percent, but you have to approach piracy from two sides. It’s not just here’s the deterrent effect, it’s also about how to make the distribution better, so we’re leveraging blockchain-based technology, linked into peer-to-peer technologies in general to look a whole new distribution structure,” he said.

Featured image from Shutterstock.