Tech startup Veredictum.io thinks it can reduce piracy by 80% and revolutionise digital distribution - but they need everyone to come to the party. We speak to CEO Tim Lea.

Digital piracy is an ever-present topic in entertainment circles, but no one seems to know how best to address the issue. The oft-spoken refrain is that giving customers the content they desire, when they want it, and at the price they want to pay is the way forward, but extant distribution models are slow to change, and attempts to work outside those streams and still turn a profit have met with mixed results at best.

Tim Lea, CEO of Australian start-up Veredictum.io, has felt the sting of piracy. Back in 2014 he wrote, produced, and directed the science fiction feature 54 Days, which under-performed – largely due to being pirated online.

“When you have 116 people involved in a project and people value it less than nothing, you just sort of think enough’s enough,” he tells us.

So he changed tack, began to look at the systemic issues, economic, cultural, and technological, which give rise to digital piracy, and has returned to the entertainment world not as a creator but as – perhaps – a savior. Lea claims that copyright protection and distribution innovations spearheaded by his company could reduce digital piracy by 80% within 10 years – a recovery worth over $20 billion per year in the film industry and $12.5 billion in the music industry.

“It’s all about hitting the drivers of film and video piracy,” Lea explains. “In other words, when people can’t get the content they want when they want, how they want, at a price point that’s fair, and there aren’t enough deterrents. Essentially, we’re creating a structure that we think will certainly help reduce that problem.”

Veredictum takes a carrot-and-stick approach, firstly making it easier for creators to police copyright breaches, and secondly making it easier for creators and consumers to share material at a negotiated price. “Essentially, we’re leveraging a lot of new technologies to do this, and we’re bringing the creative community together to actually represent what I term a decentralised structure not only for hunting pirated material, but also for distributing legitimate material.”

It’s complicated, to say the least; Veridictum is taking a holistic approach to the issue, coming at it from a number of angles, using decentralised, networked computing power – Lea compares it to the way volunteers at SETI parse collected radio data from their own home computers during periods of downtime. “A lot of creative guys have got very, very powerful computers on their desks and they’re just not being used at nighttime.”

Lea continues, “The first stage is to register the ownership and distribution rights of video content. We will then digitally fingerprint the video content related to those ownership and distribution rights. Then with the decentralised structure – the SETI for pirated content – we can actually get individual parties to go hunting for pirated content, to search for those digitally fingerprinted videos.”

With Veridictum members – anyone can join, for free – volunteering their own computer runtime as part of the network, creators would effectively help police their own copyright, using their own machines to crawl the web looking for infringements.

That’s the stick, aimed at deterring your more committed pirate from hoisting the black flag. “I would suggest that, in the spectrum of piracy, there is a top 20% that you know you’re going to have to throw the big guns, the legal resources at. The other 80% would actually pay for content if they had the opportunity to get to it. It’s about creating that marketplace that will drive that particular price at that given moment in time.”

To that end, Veredictum’s network will also act as content marketplace, using peer-to-peer technology to connect creators with consumers, and there to work out a kind of best fit price point. Lea points to the famous Mundine/Green Facebook fiasco as an example of what this kind of system could avoid. “There was the Queensland guy who Facebook Lived to 150,000 people, free of charge, that fight. If we have the situation where there was a major Twitter account follower or major YouTuber on boxing who said, ‘Look, I’ve got 100,000 people who are really interested in this content who don’t want to pay $65. If we collectively pay $10 a pop, you’ve now got, say, 25 – 30,000 people that would be interested in that content at $10 a pop.’ And here’s an overall market mechanism that says ‘This is the market price that’s been defined’ and it presents a performance-related wholesale structure through to the content provider.”

It flies in the face of conventional distribution wisdom, and it’s difficult to imagine the larger and more moribund studios and distributors jumping at the chance to come on board, given the existence of years-long exclusive contracts and regional boundaries. To his credit, Lea is aware of the barriers to take-up, and expects that smaller, more agile creators will be on the bleeding edge. “It’s the early adopters, those independent parties that want to get their content out early, quickly, freshly, into the marketplace, that will adopt this first of all. That’s the way markets work in terms of adopting tech.”

As for the bigger players, a more cautious approach is expected. “Even the major guys will over time trial a few smaller projects and see how they go – that’s the way I see it happening.”

It’s an enormous undertaking, requiring a significant amount of capital to get off the ground. To that end, Veredictum has launched their own cryptocurrency to underwrite the venture. Called Ventana – Spanish for “window”. The name is meaningful – Lea likens Veredictum’s deterrent approach to Malcolm Gladwell’s “broken window” theory of crime prevention, wherein ignoring small issues leads to bigger ones down the track. “If you’ve got people pirating because they can,” he says. “Those are the broken windows.”

To learn more, head over to Veredictum’s official site.