Kodak today surprised the financial and photographic world by announcing KodakCoin, a “photo-centric” cryptocurrency, and KodakOne, an image-licensing platform that they claim will give photographers a new revenue stream and secure platform for protecting their creative work. The imaging company’s stock value jumped over 117% on the news.
Wall Street investors responded enthusiastically. Kodak’s stock rose from an opening price of $3 per stock to nearly $7 by the end of trading today. A surprising Kodak moment—not the kind we’ve seen before.
Here’s how Kodak describes it:
“Utilizing blockchain technology, the KODAKOne platform will create an encrypted, digital ledger of rights ownership for photographers to register both new and archive work that they can then license within the platform. With KODAKCoin, participating photographers are invited to take part in a new economy for photography, receive payment for licensing their work immediately upon sale, and for both professional and amateur photographers, sell their work confidently on a secure blockchain platform. KODAKOne platform provides continual web crawling in order to monitor and protect the IP of the images registered in the KODAKOne system. Where unlicensed usage of images is detected, the KODAKOne platform can efficiently manage the post-licensing process in order to reward photographers.”
While “blockchain” and “cryptocurrency” are buzzwords that mere mortals may struggle to understand, for many stock photographers who have been burned in the past, this may be welcome news. Kodak claims the KodakOne platform and KodakCoin will help photographers track and automatically manage online use of their images securely.
The new service will provide an encrypted digital ledger of rights ownership. Photographers will register both old and new images to the service and blockchain, and subsequently license them using the platform. Transactions will be done using KodakCoin instead of US Dollars or other currencies.
The initial coin offering will open on January 31, 2018 and is open to accredited investors from the U.S., UK, Canada and other select countries. For more information visit www.kodakcoin.com.
