Algorand has entered into a partnership with the Italian Society of Authors and Publishers (SIAE) to create a new platform for decentralized copyright management. Before this, the SIAE was advised by the La Sapienza University of Rome and consulting firm Blockchain Core to work with Hyperledger. Following that project, SIAE has partnered up with Algorand, becoming the latest high-profile company to collaborate with it.

Why decentralize copyright management

With the advent of the internet, content attribution has become increasingly more difficult. There are millions of royalty-free images shared every week on stock photo websites that are not being attributed to the photographers/designers creating them. Even worse, there have been plenty of instances of people straight-up stealing other artist’s work by using methods like rotation, cropping, grayscale conversion, etc. to skirt around copyright laws. Efficient copyright management should be enough to curb these infringements, however, there are some significant obstacles:

• It is hard for a company to monitor the content usage of its employees because of the share volume of violations.

• Nowadays, it is straightforward to share content thanks to technology.

• Big companies have their employees spread across the globe. As such, it isn’t easy to keep track of their activities. Plus, copyright rules differ from country to country.

• Finally, there is just a general lack of awareness when it comes to content sharing. People simply don’t know if what they are doing it wrong or not.

The blockchain technology has found utility in multiple sectors and spaces, like copyright management. Since the blockchain is a public and decentralized public ledger, it is perfect for cataloging and storing original works of art, documents, manuscripts, photographs, and images. On top of that, the blockchain’s immutability will make it impossible for someone to tamper with the content stored within it, which will prevent the wrongful usage of intellectual property.

SIAE and Algorand partnership details
The goals of the SIAE are as follows:

• Explore future opportunities offered by technology.

• Try to work on solutions that bring in more efficiency and transparency.

• Collaborate with major companies in the fields of research and innovation.

SIAE realizes that these goals can be easily achieved via blockchain integration, which is why they have collaborated with Alogrand. Both of them plan on creating and fortifying copyright management tools and services. Algorand’s pure proof-of-stake protocol makes it perfect for handling the numerous metadata and transactions necessary for copyright management.

Silvio Micali, the founder of Algorand, said about the partnership:

Collaboration between technology providers and forward-thinking organizations such as SIAE opens up vast opportunities for progression towards new economic models that promote inclusivity, transparency, and frictionless transactions.

SIAE general manager, Gaetano Blandini, added:

The world is evolving, but the founding mission of the Italian Society of Authors and Publishers, the protection of creativity, does not change. Our collaboration with Algorand is part of a process already started and is aligned with research and innovation on a national and global scale.

Conclusion

Algorand’s scalable ecosystem has attracted a lot of institutional attention. It has partnered with IDEX, the #1 decentralized exchange (DEX) on Ethereum, AssetBlock, Reach, DUST Identity, and World Chess. They also made a lot of waves by launching Algorand Smart Contracts (ASC) and being one of the few projects in the crypto space that’s entirely Sharia-compliant.