Stanley Kubrick, copyright and blockchain

Creating a copyright proof that recognizes the authorship of a creation has always been a recurring theme in any creative community. Since the Statute of Queen Anne (1710), which was the first statute to provide for copyright regulated by the government and courts, have been emerging different increasingly reliable methods to grant copyright certificates.

Throughout history many artists have found creative solutions to certify their works, always using methods that were not initially thought for this purpose. The case of director Stanley Kubrick that we have recently discovered thanks to the exhibition Stanley Kubrick (CCCB, Barcelona) http://www.cccb.org/en/exhibitions/file/stanley-kubrick/228237 has caught our attention. The exhibition is about the photographic and cinematographic work of this acclaimed director and it brings many details and documents related to his creative process.

Kubrick is a meticulous director who stands out for his obsessive attention to detail which is undoubtedly reflected in his particular use of images and narratives in his films. A clear demonstration of this obsession with the control of his creative processes, is the method to create a proof of creation on the script of his movie Along Came a Spider. Kubrick sent himself the 37-page script by ordinary mail. The sealed envelope with the postmark of May 15, 1953 became a proof of copyright. A time stamp based on the bureaucratic system of mail services. While it’s not an infallible system, it would grant Kubrick a proof of his authorship over this script.

It is inevitable to think of this action of Kubrick as an analogy of what can be done today with blockchain technology, since this technology allows creating a “postmark” or time stamp that works as proof of copyright of a work.

The Blockchain technology was not designed primarily to work as a system that would perform copyright proofs of a work, as neither the postal system was designed for this, but they can be adopted to fulfill this function.

One of the main objectives of the CREA network protocol and the use of apps based on it as https://creary.net is to provide a more efficient and secure solution than that used by Kubrick with the postal system. Instead of sending a physical package, on Creary.net you can send any work of digital art together with a metadata, licenses, and the hash of the file, so that they are certified in the time stamp of the CREA blockchain. This way, a chain of links is created that points to the original author of the work, expanding his digital stamp that is related to all his previously published works.

If Kubrick, with such a privileged mind and keen awareness of the importance of certifying the authorship of his creative works, were alive there is no doubt that he’d be very interested in the use of CREA’s technology to certify his works.