Is this kind of platform still a profitable business? Since we are in the digital age where most have their own smartphones and other gadgets to take photos, I am wondering if they can still sell those photos? If you are being a practical one, I don't think you will buy a photo online when you can just produce it on your own. Just my thoughts...
Most people will usually go to stock photo websites to use what they needed and if you saw someone is selling their own then then their best means of getting paid is to put watermarks first in their works to show it and then get paid if the buyer likes it and then he will give the photo with different quality and no watermarks. It needs no blockchain at all to have that 'trustless' system.
Problem with most stock photo websites is that photographers are paid pennies for each sale, and they have no means to control the price of their pictures.
We want to change that by being able to decide the price of your picture yourself. You will be able to sell your picture for any amount of BLNC you want, use BLNC to buy other services of our platform or convert your BLNC to your EUR/USD wallet. The system will then sell your BLNC at the current market price to people who are buying it at the same time.
Currently, there are many options to build a cryptocurrency, the easiest one being an ERC20 token. Since sending ERC20 tokens and interacting with smart contracts costs gas and we want users to be able to value their own work and decide their own price, we looked into various options of paying for gas on behalf of our users. This would rapidly become a costly experience, making the whole process counterproductive.
Thats why Birdlance decided to launch its own Proof of Stake Blockchain (based on NXT).
There are also free stock photo platforms, like Unsplash.
The problem with them is that most photographers don't understand the risk of facing a lawsuit as a result of uploading their images to such sites.
The lack of model releases when images are downloaded from such websites and used for commercial purposes being the most important point here.
If a photograph is used in a commercial sense and it is not model released, the photographer is liable. He can be taken to court and sued.
Also we are very skeptical by the number of photographers who are actually benefiting from using those platforms and obviously you'll see some success stories on major photography news websites.
What those platforms do is make a deliberate effort to keep its users informed about how many views their images are receiving, they are just tapping into vanity and dopamine hits with statistics that seem to blow the likes of Instagram out of the water.
But all they actually achieve is that multi-billion dollar multinationals are using photographers' work for free.
On the other hand, 85% of all pictures online are used without permission, our system generates a unique hash of each photo and can store that hash on our blockchain. When derived works are made of this photo, such as mirroring the image, making it black and white, etc, we can trace it back to the original hash.
Hope this clears up your questions!
We shifted our main focus to an online service to protect your pictures, illustrations and artwork by submitting them to the Birdlance blockchain. Track where your images are being used online powered by each node in the Birdlance network. Use our developers API to include image recognition capabilities such as tagging or not suitable for work classifying in your own applications or submit an URL of any image and get a unique hash backed by a blockchain transaction.
