This interview was originally published in Cybernews
From Instagram bloggers to photographers and Youtube creators – all have found their own niche and loyal audience online. But having to deal with impostors and those who wish to exploit others’ work for their own benefit hinders creativity.
How should one protect his creation when it is shared among millions? And why is such protection even necessary? To learn more about this, the Cybernews team has reached out to Georgios Efstratiadis, the CEO of CopyrightsWorld – copyright protection, monitoring, and monetization service.
How did the idea of CopyrightsWorld come to life? What has the journey been like?
In 2001, I founded the first online music community in Greece (Musicwave. gr), which came to be one of the largest in Europe. Since then, we have been getting a lot of questions about copyright and online protection. Users were reluctant to upload their creations to a place where everyone could easily get a copy just by making a right-click. Over the years, that was something I constantly had on my mind, looking for a solution that would fit the new developments and creator needs. When blockchain came into play, it clicked right away. This technology is like made for copyright registration. So, me and my co-founder Michael adopted it and started building services around it. That’s how CopyrightsWorld was born.
Can you tell us a little bit about what you do? What are the main challenges you help navigate?
CopyrightsWorld wants to liberate creativity in this new era. We want every creator to feel free and safe to share his work and engage with his potential audiences. That’s why we have created real-time copyright registration on the blockchain and worldwide monitoring that checks the public web and lets you know who is using your work and in what way. And if there is any infringement, we got you covered. Takedown notices and court reports are here to equip you with everything you will need to defend your case.
Also, our automation plugs into the creator’s workflow and pulls data from social media accounts and blogs, protecting and monitoring it automatically. Just set it and forget it. We don’t want to be in the way of our users. We want to be a platform that takes care of what people create transparently, affordably, and in real-time.
In your opinion, what are the most concerning threats that digital asset owners and creators face nowadays?
Ownership, in general, is something that will concern us a lot in this new era. Every 60 seconds, we post 1M stories on Instagram, upload 700 hours of content on YouTube, and send more than 200M emails. And this is only growing at exponential rates. At the same time, people are used to taking and using anything they find online as it is free, and that must change. It’s a long and hard educational process. Also, the new technologies make it almost impossible to recognize something authentic from a copy or a deepfake. NFTs will make a difference on the ownership and tracking part, but the deepfake issue is far from solved.
How did the recent global events affect the blockchain landscape? Were there any new challenges you had to adapt to?
People sometimes think of blockchain technology and cryptos as the same thing. Blockchain is a backbone technology that is here to stay. Cryptos are built on top of this technology, and of course, many carry no real value. Of course, cryptos are the way to go when it comes to monetary values, but it’s a work in progress. In our case, we engage with all new technologies and use them to create better services for our customer base. We constantly adopt. We have our own blockchain technology, and we are plugging into the crypto ecosystem.
In general, people must be careful and invest only in cryptos with a real utility, business, and roadmap behind them, using money they can risk losing. That’s not financial advice. In any case, it’s just my two cents.
Since digital assets are a relatively new technology, what myths and misconceptions surrounding this environment do you notice most often?
A lot of creators think of copyright as something super complicated to manage and protect. And that used to be the case. Not anymore. Also, some people think copyrights do not apply to digital assets. That’s untrue and dangerous. Every creation of any type and format comes with copyright. But just creating something is not self-proving. In the case where you will have to prove you are the owner of that work, your word is not enough. According to international copyright law, you will need strong and early third-party proof of ownership to become the actual beneficiary. And that’s exactly part of what we do. Affordably, automatically and hustle-free.
What predictions do you have for the future of blockchain technology?
I see blockchains merging into one huge network. Coins, NFTs, and all digital assets will be able to move from chain to chain. Decentralization will dominate the world, and everything will be tokenized. Online and offline. People will use blockchain as a service as they now use computing power in AWS. You will not know which chain you are using, and you shouldn’t care at the end of the day. Also, ownership will become something very important. Ownership and responsibility are two sides of the same coin.
What other technological advancements do you hope to see used widely in the near future?
With the metaverse right at the gate and digital creativity growing exponentially, I would like to see a technology that will help us distinguish and point out fake news, deepfakes, and in general bad actors. I think we are right at the edge of losing this game as the problem of misinformation and data misuse is blowing.
In this age of ever-evolving technology, what are the key security measures everyone should implement on their devices?
Take care of your ID, always check your privacy settings, update your software, and have an eye for people pretending to be you in the digital space.
All people must be aware of the fact that anything online is there to stay. Also, any misuse or bad acting is there forever, just to be discovered at a later date. Blockchain will make these activity records even more constant and permanent, so always have this in mind.
Share with us, what’s next for CopyrightsWorld?
We currently protect and monitor all digital assets a creator can produce. We’ll soon be adding monetization services to our platform so users can make a living out of their creations. NFTs are a logical next step for us.
Also, we just launched our coin. cwCoin is the first creator-economy utility token that comes with amazing free services for anyone that holds it. We are aiming for a new micro-economy around this coin, so creators of any kind can participate and make use of all the benefits that come and will come with it.
