Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE), the Italian major copyright collecting agency founded in 1882, and Algorand, a leading blockchain platform accelerating the convergence of decentralized and traditional finance, announce the first major milestone of a project to create a blockchain-based open platform that allows transparent and efficient management of authors’ rights.
The two organizations have been working together since 2019 and copyrights for the first time are represented as digital assets. The history of SIAE began 139 years ago and today, with Algorand, the organization embraces a future empowered by technology to continue its mission of protecting creativity for its users.
The world changes and rights become digital assets
This week, more than 4 million NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens) were created that will digitally represent the rights of the more than 95,000 SIAE members authors. NFTs, a type of digital asset registered on blockchain, will thus be used for the first time represent author’s rights of SIAE members. Digitizing these rights on a decentralized and transparent public blockchain is the first requirement to build an open infrastructure able to protect author’s rights end-to-end, as envisioned by SIAE for the future of the industry.
“Ensuring the protection of creativity has been SIAE’s mission for 139 years, and this project demonstrates that our goal is to continue to guarantee it for the next 139 years,” said Gaetano Blandini, General Manager of SIAE. “We are not interested in building technological infrastructures to generate profit. Instead, our goal has been and always will be to create value addition for our members. This is why we can afford to talk about open infrastructures and make all our know-how available to the community. Blockchain technology is definitely an interesting strand to continue exploring because of its transparency and efficiency – by design – features, which are fundamental for those who, like us, manage the salary of other people’s hard work.”
The creation of these unique digital assets is the first step towards even more ambitious goals, allowing for more transparent and efficient management of the rights themselves, in their journey from those who use the right (those who listen to music, for example) and those who live with royalties (the music creator). In the future, the role of intermediaries in the ecosystem of content and rights management will change radically. SIAE, a non-profit organization that truly belongs to the authors, can and will facilitate a transition to new blockchain-based platforms that will rapidly and profoundly change the business models for many other intermediaries across the management of rights and contents.
An open project on a public blockchain accessible to anyone
The project started in Italy and has the potential for international adoption. Copyright management is a global topic and blockchain-based solutions are scalable for broad adoption. To benefit everyone in the content creation and consumption ecosystem, all global copyright collecting agencies must strive for mass adoption, in a phased approach. SIAE intends to share its project results with the broader community to expedite the truly decentralized management of this metadata, which is fundamental for accurate and transparent management of rights. In this way, we would quickly arrive at a truly decentralized management of these metadata, which are fundamental for a correct and transparent management of rights. The system is also already designed – in a vision of true open decentralization – to be able to transfer management directly to rightholders, who will then be able to manage directly the metadata relating to their rights.
“SIAE has brought an ambitious project to life, where transparency and simplicity in data management are becoming a new reality for their industry,” said Professor Silvio Micali, winner of the Turing Prize, MIT Professor, and founder of Algorand. “SIAE is a forward thinking organization that will open up new opportunities as they build the foundations for new economic models. I am thrilled to have SIAE a part of the Algorand ecosystem as they embrace the scalability, efficiency and security of Algorand.”
About SIAE
Founded in Milan in 1882, SIAE (Italian Society of Authors and Publishers) is a public economic institution and membership base for the management of copyright, ranked sixth in the world ranking of companies collecting, as confirmed by the data of the Global Collections Report 2020, published by CISAC (Confédération Internationale des Sociétés d’Auteurs et Compositeurs). Every year SIAE releases more than 1.2 millions of licenses for the use of works protected by it, guaranteeing payment to authors and publishers the right compensation for their work. SIAE also supports the Italian cultural and creative industry with economic contributions for numerous artistic initiatives, and it is at the side of various social activities and solidarity. For more information, visit www.siae.it.
About Algorand Inc.
Algorand is building the technology to power the Future of Finance (FutureFi), the convergence of traditional and decentralized models into a unified system that is inclusive, frictionless, and secure. Founded by Turing Award-winning cryptographer Silvio Micali, Algorand developed a blockchain infrastructure that offers the interoperability and capacity to handle the volume of transactions needed for defi, financial institutions and governments to smoothly transition into FutureFi. The technology of choice for more than 500 global organizations, Algorand is enabling the simple creation of next generation financial products, protocols and exchange of value.
Founder Dinis Guarda
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