Theft and piracy of film and video scripts are a persistent issue, but Blockchain technology looks like offering a platform to permanently register, store, securely distribute, and even sell those scripts legally, says entrepreneur Tim Lea.

He launched Veredictum.io in August as a “smart, faster and more affordable” cryptographic protection and distribution platform. In a way it’s solving a problem other start-ups have, particularly creative enterprises.

Lea is an advocate of the seven-year-old technology, saying “once you go down the rabbit hole of Blockchain, you might not go back – that’s the power of [it] … it’s so raw, so full of potential.”

Importantly for intellectual property, Blockchain creates a permanent record to identify provenance or ownership of a script, date it and identify the creator then link all this information to tokens so registration can never be changed. That registration can be presented in a court of law confirming ownership.

“We register those tokens to the Blockchain. Those files can be recreated from that token. Think of a shadow puppeteer creating a dove flying. The actual image you see on the wall of the dove flying represents the token. No one can see the original, only the shadow. That shadow represents the file and if one pixel or one full stop is changed on that file, that shadow will change,” he says. (For more demystification about Blockchain, check out Lea’s free short video course).

As a multi-award winning screenwriter for many years, Lea says piracy has always “niggled” him.

"Our overall objective is to reduce film and video piracy by 80 per cent within five years.”

“I know how much work goes into a film. We had 116 people involved in producing our feature film launched in February 2015. There was some piracy of our movie, too. I thought Blockchain might be able to solve the problem.”

He cites the case of creatives who pitched their zombie reality film idea to a major broadcaster, who then passed it onto another company, who loved it and ran with it, without crediting the authors. The problem was the creators hadn’t registered their ownership of that 300-page pitch.

“It’s not just a question of bashing people over head about piracy, but looking at new distribution model – what they want, when they want it as well as having deterrent effect in place. Our overall objective is to reduce film and video piracy by 80 per cent within five years.”

So far, creatives in his network have given him feedback to the Veredictum platform to allow him to finesse it before he launched the minimum viable product recently – for scripts. He still considers the platform to be testing his hypotheses, to see how people will accept the Blockchain as a new base technology to “undertake some services they haven’t contemplated before”.

“The idea we’re enabling is that show format, novel, anything that’s in songs, lyrics, can be registered in written format. In theory they could register a video [later on],” Lea says.

He still considers the platform to be testing his hypotheses, to see how people will accept the Blockchain as a new base technology.

One of the “lower hanging fruit” Veredictum is focusing on is “free booting”, social media theft where someone downloads a video, strips the producer’s content, adds their own and reposts the video as their own.

Lea’s just hired a coding-savvy advisor with 20 years of “deep video technology experience” to tackle the challenges of video-based technology. The aim is get a prototype available with six to nine months.

“We’re working on technology behind the scenes that enables ownership of video based content to be tracked, then digitally fingerprint that content to link to that ownership and then allow that ownership to be tracked.”

All up he’s got a team of 10 advisers and contractors working for him full time since last November. Lea sees himself as a “translator” of the technology and the business requirements to the tech team.

“I can’t do the coding myself, but I understand how it works so I can drive the vision,” he says.

He’s self-funded Veredictum and will continue to do so for at least another six to nine months, while he talks to investors to secure more funding. Currently platform users are charged a one-time registration fee, but they’re investigating a subscription model, too.

“That’s the power for us of the Blockchain. It has a whole variety of other uses, which are very, very wide and very, very deep and we are leveraging."

Lea also talks about “enhanced monetisation through new distribution models” saying he wants people to be able to use the platform to resell their product, so ownership could be disabled for them and passed onto someone else.

“If you have a physical DVD, you can take it to a market stall and sell it, but if you get a digital download, you can’t do anything with it.”

Lea looks to Blockchain as offering a “whole variety of other uses … very wide and very deep, which we are leveraging”. They include formalising the payment of royalties to musicians when their content is used on videos, for example.

“That’s the power for us of the Blockchain. It has a whole variety of other uses, which are very, very wide and very, very deep and we are leveraging.

“The opportunity for dramatic disruptive change is palpable from the ecosystem and [I am] always happy to connect to fellow entrepreneurs and those working with new technologies … let’s talk - you never know where it might take us.”

Margaret Paton

Former Sunday Age staff journalist, Margaret Paton (formerly Jakovac) has written widely for corporations/government departments and more than 100 online/hard copy mastheads in regional NSW, Sydney, Melbourne and Europe.