Ethereum Co-Founder Reveals How Journalists and Artists Can Gain From Blockchain

Joseph Lubin, the co-founder of Ethereum and founder of Ethereum development studio ConsenSys has described how blockchain technology can benefit journalists and creative content creators.

In a video posted by ConsenSys Media on Tuesday, March 12, Lubin explained that blockchain give content creators and journalists direct access to their audience and because of this, they are “set to benefit quite dramatically” from the technology.

“I think artists in the music industry on average capture about 11 or 12 percent of the value in the industry and those big record companies are sucking up 70 or so percent,” Lubin noted, suggesting that “We can replace those record companies with smart contracts on the Ethereum platform.”

He explained that the intermediaries like content promoters, curators and bloggers that could remain in the new system would not take commanding positions nor collect the enormous commissions like the big media companies currently do.

”…so the value that they extract should be commensurate with the value that they’re adding to that flow and should create a better world for artists of different varieties” he continued.

Lubin also mentioned potential ways blockchain would help the journalism industry making particular mention of Civil, a blockchain-based platform for ethical journalism. Having decried the gutted state of journalism which is riddled by click baits and little focus on truth, he recommended blockchain as the panacea which would return ethics to journalism.

Lubin explained:

“… Civil [is] working to bring content directly to the consumer without that commercial intermediary in the middle sucking up all the value and filtering the information … it enables ethics to be brought to bear again in journalism by essentially creating a constitution codes of conduct enabling newsrooms to form to define who their journalists are to create a charter by which they operate … if they break that pledge in some way their readership their listenership can call them to task and challenge their stake and potentially have the bumped off the platform”

In an interview with Smartereum last year, Lubin highlighted some features of the Civil platform.

He said:

“Civil is a platform for ethical journalism, sustainable ethical journalism. It has a constitution, it has lots of newsrooms that have already joined. Lots of professional journalists and there’ll be topically focused newsrooms. Associated Press is now a partner there’s another major partner… partner means that they either use the ecosystem or use the infrastructure…The Associated Press, they’re enabling licensing of all of their content to all of the newsrooms.

As Smartereum reported, Civil announced they would proceed with their launch plans for February 2019 despite not being able to meet their ICO target investment. Civil reportedly managed just over $1.4 million out of an expected $8 million from the token sale of its CLV tokens.

The platform launched last month and allows individuals to purchase a membership on the platform. The project has also continued the sale of its CLV tokens without hard caps or soft cap. It will continue until the allocation meant for public sale is disbursed.

The ConsenSys video is part of a “Blockchain Explained” series and focused on How Companies are using Blockchain Today.

Solomon Sunny is the market reporter for Smartereum, one of the global leaders in Ethereum, blockchain and currency news. He produces technical price updates on digital currencies and writes recent developments about blockchain.

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