Startup Blockai Tackles a Big Problem: Copyright Control

If you’re a photographer, artist, or writer, there’s only one way to stop people from ripping off your copyrighted material online: don’t share it with anyone… ever.

This is a big problem for startup founders and iPhone app developers, because content is one of the most expensive — and hard to replicate — parts of the marketing and communication that drives digital businesses.

Thanks to a new startup’s crusade against copyright abusers, losing your content to the online hordes may become a thing of the past. Or, at the very least, it’ll become a lot easier for iPhone app developers to crack down on ripoff artists.

Blockai is essentially a much simpler copyright database, with a few future-minded features: the startup scans the web for duplications and alerts creators when copycats are located.

The goal of Blockai’s work, according to CEO Nathan Lands, is to answer this question for every item on the web: “who owns the copyright?”

The most useful feature for Twitter-savvy iPhone app developers is their new integration with Twitter, allowing users to file a Blockai claim with a tweet and hashtag. Just tweet your copyrighted content with the hashtag #blockai, and their AI software will automatically create a claim page.

While Blockai claim pages have yet to make it to court as evidence, they’ve been successful thus far as fuel for cease-and-desist orders. For creators, a screenshot or email doesn’t hold much weight when you’re threatening a copyright abuser. Blockai’s certificates, on the other hand, have an air of authenticity — and presumably would hold water much better than screenshots and user-generated records in a court of law.

Blockchain technologies like Blockai’s database system have a bright future on mobile, and it’ll be exciting to see how San Francisco iPhone app developers elaborate on this concept to bring digital transparency to formerly complex systems.