Inspiration
Recent IP Crime and Enforcement report 2020-2021 showed that the entertainment industry still has some issues with IP infringement. Some reports showed that the global movie industry’s revenue losses from digital piracy are between 40 and 97.1 billion dollars per year (GIPC, NERA Economic Consulting). It is clear that we have a huge problem with IP infringement, but we still lack effective solutions.
In order to prevent IP crime we need to find more effective ways to protect IP, educate consumers about Fair IP use and make it easier for businesses and creatives to connect with original IP holders.
With the recent news about NFTs, web3 and blockchain, a lot of startups tried to apply these new technologies to solve IP infringement, but we still struggle to reduce IP theft, in some cases NFT platforms even worsen this issue creating a negative attitude towards this technology.
To understand this issue on real examples we conducted some research in the film industry - looking at different tours around London showing filming locations. Some of them were priced more than £1000 and after contacting film studios about these tours, we discovered that the majority of them are not connected to film studios in any way and they are just using their IP in order to earn money without sharing this profit with the original IP holders. With our platform we want to solve this issue by connecting the original IP holders with their fans/tours agencies/etc to produce meaningful experiences without IP infringement. We are planning to achieve it by using web3 technologies and registering the original IP on a blockchain. Later, people will be able to use it as building blocks for their experiences, such as film tours and immersive experiences. Web3 tech will help us ensure that the original IP holders will receive a fair share from this profit and our society will be able to use their IP without any infringement.
What it does
We wanted to create a place to connect original IP holders with businesses and influencers who would like to build experiences on top of their IP to reach a wider audience and help original IP holders to market their IP.
Our solution will make this process simpler and safer using web3 technologies. With our platform film studios or other IP holders no longer need to worry about IP infringement - they can simply turn their IP into NFTs, upload it to our NFT pool where customers/creatives/local businesses/restaurants/shops can use this IP to market their content to a wider audience.
Those businesses, who will sign up with our platform, will later have a special mark of Fair IP use (currently in the form of a QR code), so their customers can be sure that their business is legitimate and they are not breaking any IP law. In this case we can encourage fair use of IP. It will be as simple as playing with lego blocks and it will help increase creativity without IP infringement.
The companies who would like to borrow NFTs from the original IP holders will be able to subscribe to our platform where they can get access to the NFT pool. By choosing a certain number of NFTs they will be able to use them for a month or longer in order to understand the engagement from the fans. Don’t think that NFTs are just some funny pictures that you don’t really know how to use after purchasing them. Our idea is proof that there is more to it and it is one of the ways to solve IP theft.
How we built it
We built the app from the ground up to work with the Hedera services. The app was built using Next.js, which gave us the necessary tools to build a production ready app quickly. Using HashConnect allowed us to provide a user-friendly interface to work with the app and the blockchain with minimal effort. The Hedera Token Services allowed us to add smart contract behavior with limited resources while being secure without going through a tedious audit process. Being written in Solidity, we could use popular mature Web3 platforms like Remix to compile and verify our code. Libraries like hethers allowed us to work directly with these contracts on the client-side, when used in combination with HashPack we can provide a full end-to-end service with minimal backend involvement. Without a dedicated backend to power the smart contracts, we promote interoperability with any others who would want to use the same platform.
To enhance the user experience on our platform, we store some information in an intermediate database like Firebase to allow advanced search capabilities.
Challenges we ran into
Compared to other Web3 technologies we have worked with in the past, using the Hedera services was relatively easy. The only issue is working with event emitters in the hethers and hashconnect libraries, in my personal opinion this is harder to work with than an alternative that is built using promises.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were able to reach out to some major players in the film industry and local businesses to prove that the problem we are trying to solve is legit, giving us a green light to go forward.
We also managed to put together a prototype of the idea in a short time. Our experience with a variety of Web3 projects has allowed us to hit the ground running and put together a prototype in a short amount of time.
What we learned
Coming up with a satisfactory solution to the legal problem has been fun technically, but from experience it’s not always as simple as it appears. In the future we will need to seek professional legal help to address this problem.
What's next for Legalit
With our project we would like to support our goal of fair IP use. In the next five years the UK is planning to tackle IP infringement and crime and we want to help them sort those issues.
The next steps:
- Finish up the blockchain implementation end-to-end, there were a few parts that were cut short due to time constraints
- Work on a custodial wallet alternative to work with our platform, this will allow us to approach less tech-savvy users which will widen our reach.
- Legal consultations to understand if this system will solve the current IP issues
- Building it into our startup, Amata World, to manage IP for our customers
- Fundraising to build a team around this product
- Getting agreements with first film studios as our early adopters
- Marketing our solution to a wider audience
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