ORBIS.exchange project

Owned by DGTal Eesti
Last updated: Mar 02, 2022 by Evgen Merzliakov
6 min read

Innovation Tagline:  Let’s create the global IP-data exchange platform together

Project Keywords:  #BlockchainForCreators #IP-data #IP-assets #ORBIS.exchange #RightsManagement #RoyaltyProcessing #Proof-of-Consensus #RegisteredDigitalOwnership #TokenizedContent #CopyrightProtection

Project Members

  1. Evgen Merzliakov 
  2. DGTal Eesti

Project Description 

We see our mission to reinvent how creators are credited, and content metadata is processed, we want to innovate the stakeholder's experience and solve the problem of fragmented or lost copyright information using blockchain technology and smart contracts. We have named our approach the ORBIS.exchange project that aiming to:

  • assemble and launch the global intellectual property (IP) - data exchange platform
  • help in the fight against piracy
  • assure the provenance of media assets
  • bypass inefficient middle men and bureaucratic chains
  • lay the groundwork for new ecosystem of IP-assets and digital collectibles
  • and encourage creative national scenes

Blockchains in general will add property rights to the digital world, despite they still in their infancy, and it will take another 2-3 years before they will become part of our everyday life. And there is no doubt for us that the market will eventually have a blockchain solution for all creative industry pain points that will be highly beneficial for all.

Our team working on transition from traditional distribution chain to the blockchain-powered platform that will provide a solution streamlining the whole process, from the declaration of rights ownership to the instant delivery of up-to-date information to all stakeholders, that will bring unprecedented improvements to current complicated systems.

Our objectives in creating a new digital IP-ecosystem are as follows:

  1. making IP-metadata findable and protected, which gives an additional transparency: any registered party can be part of the system and check any IP-asset status;
  2. making data accessible for creative community, hi-tech companies, broadcasters, governments and tax authorities, which gives an additional trust: nobody can tamper with the smart contracts;
  3. making data interoperable between all players and platforms, which gives a
  • decentralization: no single entity owns the database, while it operates on crowdsourced contribution;
  • consensus: disintermediation in an interoperable solution that shares the data across all stakeholders and integrates with their in-house databases;
  1. making every IP-asset identified by token with unique asset_ID and increase metadata reuse (through licenses and sublicenses specified in smart contracts) which gives a conflict detection and resolution at early stages;
  2. making metadata matched to associated content stored at DSPs that leads to more visibility for commercial users and to content subsequent monetization, which gives an additional traceability: ability to check the usage claims that IP-asset has received over time;
  3. any rights' holder should be able to associate metadata and rights management data in such a format that suits best his content and matches best the expectations of his intended users, customers, platforms and licensee's.


The transition from current distribution chain to the ORBIS.exchange includes few stages or components as follows:

Component #1: market entry - creating catalog and establishing data workflow

Metadata:

  • Description
  • Rights management
  • Royalty processing
  • additional types of unique identifiers are currently collected by us and will be deployed in smart contracts and stored in the ORBIS.exchange blockchain ledger.

Component #2: Architectural Solution


This Component is not yet presenting the technical details in-depth of each and every functionality offered by the several modules that will be developed under the framework of the ORBIS.exchange architecture. We take a layer-based approach where the functionalities of every module under each layer will be given in detail in our White Paper, after the whole architecture will be approved, providing the basis for the use cases, satisfying requirements for decentralized, secure transactions, ownership management and permissions, regulatory compliance and data privacy.


Component #3: using the smart contracts


Component #4: using the blockchain

 

Component #5: Blockchain gatekeepers - engaging trusted authorities


Component #6: Targeting users - DIY-creators


Component #7: Media matching module – creating the content monitoring engine


Component #8: every IP-asset can be identified by token with unique asset_ID


Component #9: payment procedure - royalties

Problem

  • Music authors have traditionally found themselves in a relatively weak position with regard

to the control of their rights.

  • Current global problem is also to find and pay the proper copyright owners. Missing credits frequently result from missing metadata, which in turn contributes to a massive build-up of unpaid royalties to creators.
  • The issue of piracy and data loss, infringing uses of works, is still painful.
  • Creator’s involvement in the IP-rights ecosystem is still not well integrated.

  • The most important part of creative community is “DIY sector”. The share of creators that work on a DIY-basis (do-it-yourself) or, in other words, indies (independents) is ever-growing. Independent authors have more control over their rights than signed authors, but they often find it hard to commercialize their music without the support of a distributor.

    The issue now is to add value to the global digital marketplace by ensuring that independents have a vehicle to enhance their ability to compete in the ever-changing world of digital content, as well as to protect the value of their rights. 

b. 

Online music services, however, require multi-territorial licenses. The inadequacy of the EU’s mono-territorial system of music rights management to meet the multi-territorial licensing demands of online

music services put the traditional system under pressure.

Commercial providers, who want to offer online music services, have to seek to secure rights from different rights holders and in different countries. In addition, they are confronted with situations where the granting of a blanket license is impossible due to the decision of rights holders to withdraw their rights from some local collective societies

c. Competitive landscape is to gave creator's ability to control their right to content for independent system what could regulate effort of creator using open and trustful distributed technologies.

Solution

a. The ORBIS.exchange project will design and implement a new paradigm of a distributed platform architecture for IP-rights registration, matching and content usage record based on blockchains.

While the content itself will not be generated by our platform, the management of this content will finally derive into blockchain transactions containing associated metadata. This metadata will be relevant not only for our platform evaluation, but also for all third parties intending to adopt our solution, first for DIY-sector and DSPs.

We will focus on the application of permissioned blockchain to media-specific and entertainment use cases. Such activity will automatically foreground solutions such as decentralized metadata, digital distribution, copyright protection, royalty payments, value chains, tokenized content, counterfeit reduction, and registered digital ownership. By logical extension, our music market expertise will lead to real-world scenarios or solutions for cinematic, literary, audiovisual, e-sports, photographic publishers and for all digital media including films, images, 3D-models, texts etc. Besides of music, the ORBIS.exchange platform will be in order to solve long-standing problems in the creative industries, for fair distribution and legally appropriate attribution of different media IP-assets.


b.  Right now, the music industry and global IP value chain operate using outdated technology created over 30 years ago. Music copyrights are stored on thousands of separate databases, containing mismatched and incomplete data using antiquated crediting procedures (email chains and pen-and-paper logs among them). This makes the music licensing and royalty distribution processes slow, inefficient and not fit for purpose, meaning creators, collaborators and rights holders cannot be paid accurately and receive everything they have earned.


c. MVP version contains:

System that could create tokenized content of DIY authors, including metadata for future abilities of creation marketplace based on decentralized technologies.

Accomplishment and Team

a. Team is a few technical specialists, manager and a team of professionals in an intellectual property content.

b. We need help in a technical architecture and in a way how to create tokenized content, not only using a way of NFT. 

Project Plan

a. 

  • Discovery phase;
    • Create technical software requirements;
  • Start R&D phase;
  • Build architecture for solution;
  • Create app for tokenization content without hard restriction to a type of files containing content from creator.

b. Find best model for this solution in a tokenization, choose between account based and UTXO tokenization models.

Create business logic.

Create architecture of a project.

 Create backend, distributed system and frontend.

c. Confirmation of hypothesis that HLF could create the core of a future system in a tokenization process.

This is a main risk, if Fabric could create this main core for such system it gave us the ability to create software for resolving problems of an industry.

Other risks -is a standard risk of software development process, and a risk management table will be created in a future with a way hot to mitigate those risks. We need help for technical mentorship of Solution architect and experience based on a work in a Hyperledger Media & Entertainment SIG.