When a large fraction of the netizen community took to a nationwide debate over the video YouTube vs. TikTok: The End, made by a leading youtuber named Carry Minati, and whether it should have been taken down or not by YouTube, bringing the TikTok application to limelight like never before, it was brought to my notice as well. Although I felt the issue to be absolutely a waste of my time to comment upon, I started reading on a bigger picture to the story to feed the IP geek in me and understand how TikTok pivoted to blockchain technology in order to tackle security issues including piracy and copyright infringement, and reflect my opinions on why this is the next big thing for the media industry among others.

A Glance of the Blockchain Tech World

Before understanding how TikTok incorporated this next-big thing to its advantage, let me give you a brief on the mind-boggling concept of how blockchain technology works. It is a time-stamped series of recorded data which cannot be modified after its initialization and is managed by a cluster of computers that do not have single ownership. Each of these blocks of recorded data is secured and are bound to each other using cryptographic principles commonly called a chain. After bringing a revolution in the financial industry, healthcare, hospitality, agriculture, among others; now we will see how it is transforming the social media industry as well; giving an edge to the real content creators and owners.

How TikTok Leveraged this Tech to its Use

Douyin a Chinese video sharing platform, popularly known as TikTok in the Western World owned by ByteDance, had been exploring to achieve Blockchain Technology and Artificial Intelligence to its business model in a collaboration with the Chinese State Media since the past year to make up for security vulnerabilities which allow intruders to take control of accounts. Apart from that it also wanted to implement these as a method for verifying the authenticity of video contents, further aiming at authenticating its users and offering deepfake capabilities. Reticently, with great deliberation and stimulation from the ever-growing security concerns, it was finally able to implement this weapon, making it a first for the industry.

This came into wide public knowledge when Huopai, a similar application owned by Baidu stole a video originally uploaded in Douyin. Subsequently, Douyin took the course of law and sued Huopai for compensation in account of copyright infringement. This is when it surfaced and Douyin took to prove its ownership with data stored on blockchain, so as have I discussed before cannot be changed after initialization and can be utilized for proving infringement and copying; thus, proving to be the technology that fights for transparency and fairness.
In this case, making history the Hangzhou Internet Court, established in 2017 accepted blockchain evidence and found Baidu guilty. This further paved the way for blockchain in strengthening the Intellectual Property protection in the present era.

Why Media Industry in India Must Come Around this Massive Breakthrough

The promise that blockchain offers to completely nullify falsifying data records is one of its manifold pros for the media industry, it is pretty much cost effective in the long run since there is absolutely no cost for the transaction and it is completely automated. So, to give you a clearer picture, what is happening in case of the media and content sharing platforms is that information in any form is being passed from one point, say creator A.

Now A is the creator who initiates the process by creating a block, which is then verified by thousands, or millions of computers distributed around the net. The product of this as a verified block is added to a chain, which is now stored across the internet, thus creating a unique record with a unique history; making it impossible to falsify and poach even a single record, given the entire chain contains the original information, content in this scenario; in million instances.

It will be an interesting thread to follow on how blockchain is implemented and its many perks can be utilized in India in the near future for creating the Internet a safer space for original owners, artists and creators; making their creations truly public and easily verifiable by this magical decentralized system. The idea of a blockchain-based verification system that will be focused on digital rights, of audio-visual content leads me to believe that it will in the near future, if explored further and incorporated by the platforms concerned in India, might see the end of the poachers and hackers of content.