Taiwan-based start-up Bitmark Inc., which raised $1.7 million in seed funding last week, has announced the release of a new white paper titled ‘Defining Property in the Digital Environment’. The company utilises blockchain technology to establish and assert property rights to digital assets, including original photography, music, video, digital art, online papers and data and has published the paper to introduce its blockchain-based system and explain the need for it.
Bitmark’s white paper on digital property describes its property system which is intended to provide all internet-based creators and social platform users with the technology to claim ownership over their digital assets and data. Starting from a historical perspective on property rights, the white paper articulates the need for new digital property rights to encourage growth and development, much as normal property rights heralded growth in countries that introduced them. As the internet has grown to over 12-trillion gigabytes of digital data and is doubling in size every two years, the people and digital assets that could benefit from this is growing at an exponential rate.
According to the authors: “As with previous property revolutions, the most effective way to safeguard and develop undervalued resources is to establish property rights for them. What is needed is a property system for the digital environment that brings real property rights to digital assets, thereby transforming them from a growing social liability into an unparalleled new property class capable of fuelling the larger global economy.”
The white paper analyses the reasons underlying the current problems and diagrams a blockchain-based property system capable of addressing them. The first issue is how the principles of property rights apply in the digital environment and how current privacy protections for personal data fall short. Tied to this is examining how property rights for digital assets can address online piracy and how converting personal data into private property increases legal and technical protections. Bitmark is then presented as a way to solve this, looking at how bitmarks convert digital assets into digital property and also the way in which the Bitmark blockchain creates a decentralised, low-cost, open, and globally accessible digital property ledger.
The Bitmark white paper was collaboratively authored by Casey Alt, Sean Moss-Pultz, Amy Whitaker, and Timothy Chen. The white paper is being launched in conjunction with Bitmark’s beta software release which is slated for mid-December.
