The real gamble was Kodak offering their namesake in a token project for "no direct revenue from the public offering... receive a minority stake in WENN Digital, 3 percent of all KodakCoins issued and a royalty on future revenue."
Minority ownership in a random company owned by a former fraudster and 3% of the tokens with their own name on it? So many things wrong with this. Where is the secret deal that made this happen? Did the Kodak CEO get 40% of the tokens in his personal wallet? For a multi-decade, legacy brand to entrust that guy with their future is rather bizarre. If this fails, it is quite possibly the last nail for Kodak..
Kodak died 6 years ago when they went bankrupt, and split into 2 Kodaks: Alaris and Eastman. EastMan Kodak is the one that we're talking about here. They mostly make money by selling their brand name. That Kodak phone that came out a couple of years back was made entirely by another company, and Kodak just slapped their brand name on it for some cash.
Kodak Alaris is the company that makes photographic film (but not cinema film, that's Eastman). They're not going anywhere fast. I think that the number of film shooters, and demand for film, is going to stay relatively constant for the next decade.
They're not however monopolists. My favourite mid- and high-end lines (in color) are all made by Fuji and high-end BW has been consolidating/merging into a big Ilford/Kentmere conglomerate.
These are the 5 packs of Velvia, Provia, and Superia. It's not a good sign, although maybe economically it makes sense? They've also completely killed off Acros in 4x5 and 120, I'm stocking up on the 4x5 boxes.
I'm super stocked in Fuji slide stock. A lot of 120, and I don't even have a 120 camera anymore. I also have a box of Agfa CT Precisa, which is like the prettiest slide film for cross-processing.
I'm hoping (most of) these can fetch good prices in ~5 years time.
The company got an investment from his personal funds. If you are asking about where he as a person got money, Vegas is legal and likely gives tax receipts.
He took a loan from the company; if he couldn't pay it back then yeah he is in deep trouble but he could.
So you're saying it's only a problem if I lose? Well I like those odds ;)
This actually triggered a random memory of some court-room drama where a quant embezzled a bunch of money to buy lottery tickets though a system he devised, won, and then got charged after paying back the stolen seed money... in hindsight he woulda gotten away with his fictitious crime if he were a CEO or boardmember...
Wait, so which was it – he used $5000 of his own money or the company's?
I'm surprised loaning money from the company is legal in the U.S., it's certainly not here. Probably because then you can fairly easily create a tax evasion scheme where you never pay yourself a salary and just keep borrowing money at zero interest and payment due long about five years after the sun explodes...
I don’t know where “here” is, but in the U.K. it’s perfectly legal. You can even give yourself (as a director) an interest free loan.
However if the amount owed is greater than ~£10k(?) at the end of the corporate tax year, you need to pay it back within 9 months or it’s treated as income and taxed accordingly (there’s also regulations about paying it off before the end of the corporate tax year and taking out directly after). Still 21 months for an interest free loan isn’t bad...
> Probably because then you can fairly easily create a tax evasion scheme where you never pay yourself a salary and just keep borrowing money at zero interest and payment due long about five years after the sun explodes...
It's legal here in the US, but there are rules around minimum interest charges. I dealt with this during a partner buyout - the payment schedule HAD to have interest involved or else it was considered a fishy loan.
I wonder what "here" is, in Canada, generally, when you borrow funds from your company and don't repay it within one year, the CRA can assess the outstanding balance as ordinary income at an income tax rate similar to that of a salary.
Pedantic nit: the FedEx story involved a punt on blackjack, which at least involves some skill and where you can eke out a thin theoretical edge against the house if you count cards, not on black as in roulette.
As someone who grew up in the shadow of what once was the "Big Yellow Box" I cannot emphasize this enough -- Kodak has very little still going for it and has shrunk greatly. At this point it's probably worth the gamble to them, as that's how dire things are.
Kodak is just a brand that they essentially lease out. The various CEO's all shed any businesses that resembled something profitable in attempts to, well I don't know, help shareholders.
Another imaging company where Kodak has its HQ is going through a similar but slower downturn. You could say they are ... copying them (sorry). I think when a lot of the baby boomers finally retire from the workforce, office printing will drop off a cliff as far as usage goes.
Off topic, but I print research papers at work and always feel guilty about it because signs on the printers admonish you to think green... I can't properly read/think about papers otherwise.
Sure, that is always the case. But the historical process of a board choosing a CEO has no comparison to an external figure running their strategy in a new, largely unregulated, wild wild west industry.
The point is to build new decentralized protocols that will not be owned by any one central company, but will instead be the property of all of their users, who will fund their development by buying coins and who will then be rewarded by the increasing value and usefulness of those coins. This is not that. This is more like: WENN Digital will manage a centralized database of photo rights, and someone will stand off to the side shouting "blockchain!" occasionally when it seems like people's attention is drifting.
Also, that chart in the NYT with all the Kodak-colored little boxes and arrows is buzzword comedy gold. Blockchain leads to Tensorflow because why not!
The first part about institutional investors deciding which company gets to be part of a market index and which not (thus defeating the purpose of “index following”) is also very interesting. But for now everyone is happy that the “tide is lifting all boats”, that the “fundamentals are healthy” and all that, even though to me it looks sketchy as hell and reminds me of how the rating agencies were doctoring their ratings pre-2008, for “the good of their clients”.
I know this is probably not the best place for this. But I am a bit tipsy and want to type.
I was janitor at KEZI (a ABC affiliate in Eugene Oregon) and gave up and went homeless for a bit. My sister got me a room with her friend for a few months while I found a job in Portland. I had to find a job.
I had about 80 in cash so I had to cover job hunting and food with that. Not a easy task. So I stole a paper from a neighbor to look at the job listings. Great.. A temp listing and only a three miles away. So I can walk there. Fuck paying 2.50 for the bus.. That is two totinos.
So I am waiting after filling out a application. They basically have you sit there all day and call you if "day labor" is needed. "Labor Ready" if I remember correctly.
So I go out for some air and outside there is a weekly employment thing. I flip through and there is a promising ad. It is on 21st and Holgate near Reed College.. Way to far to walk. So fuck it.. I will risk the 2.50 to take the bus there and hope for the best. In my mind I was thinking job I will probably not get or 24 packets of ramen.
The job was at Qualex. Basically Kodak. We did all the film possessing in Oregon. And yes.. I got hired.
I worked in the digital room. Which was basically turning digital images upright and burning CD's. Processing thousands of images a shift. Calling the police when we hit kiddie porn, processing the images from murder scenes. The cops used us. So many suicide photos. They did not prepare us for this. Yes, suicide with a shotgun is possible. That was my Monday.
I was fired because of 9/11. I went to work on 9/11 and there was a note on the time machine spouting shit about "respect" and "mourning" and that we didn't need to come in. Which is bullshit. We didn't need to come in since nobody wanted film developed that day. And a call letting me know before I spent 90 minutes on the bus would have been fab.
So the next day it was all cool and during lunch I bitched. Shocker. After I said they didn't have us work because there was no work my card I used to clock in stopped working.
As a potentially marketable concept (if not necessarily an actually useful product), blockchain for visual data might not be such a bad idea. With the recent advent of AI-modified videos such as deepfakes, blockchain validation has been brought up as a solution to prove the authenticity of videos.
What's the long term value of paying for highly redundant, (yet highly gameable) custodial tracking of a piece of digital media when a dozen competing blockchains can be flooded by a hundred perfectly identical looking fakes made by altering a single bit in a single pixel, to generate a new hash and merkle root? Will enough people care that they don't have a signed original pepekitty by banksy when essentially perfect fake copies can still be made and distributed? Blockchain does nothing to solve this
OP said this could be a way to address fake news, and I agree, but there is a component missing.
What is needed is a system on a chip that immediately encrypts, signs and uploads any image (or video or audio) shot from the camera to a distributed public record, like a blockchain or IPFS. That gets you a creation timestamp and an unaltered source image that can be verified later if the author releases the decryption key.
Without having a SoC doing everything at once, any image that gets encrypted is already suspect. I’ll be surprised if devices like this don’t start appearing over the next few years, either for adoption by journalists or forced onto police. Apple is in a good position to do this with their devices, since their t2 chip is already managing authentication and the camera + microphone.
I think you're missing my point. The original concept framed by Kodak was protecting IP, so that freelance photographers or whomever (likely large corporations) don't have their pictures re-used. But I'm saying that blockchain watermarking could have greater immediate appeal to the public when it's reputations and lives on the line. So journalism organizations and media corporations end up buying watermark protected hardware to ensure the veracity of content.
I guess you could say that the fact it's using a block chain, any form of processing the transfer of ip/rights of the hash desired, can be out sourced. Bitpay, meta mask,. Etc
Side note I see no reason to use pow for this application, pos seams like a more appropriate security tradeoff
Putting proof of ownership of a photo on the blockchain is an interesting idea, but I don't understand the economics.
Artists pay Kodak to register their image with the blockchain, and Kodak has a mechanism to crawl the web to find images violating this blockchain registration.
Okay, great, but why would anyone want to mine their blockchain?
It's not a bad idea but they got blockchain mixed up in it. Would have been better if they had just built a low cost subscription service with some embedding in the image a crawler and the weight of a corporate lawyer for enforcement. That's a service that a one person pro photog may be willing to pay for.
well, by the many years part I would assume it's not a bad idea then and there's no value add from the blockchain so guess they are late to that party as well.
Kodak finally decides they aren't going to be late for once and this is what they choose to get in on. Classic
Wouldn't an approach not emphasizing the corporate lawyer be better? Something where say a media company can just pluck whatever images it wants out of a repository and the software will infer a blockchain hash out of the image or metadata and then bill them accordingly for usage. Make it completely simple to setup and run so pirating of images is actually harder to do.
A media company just needs to run the software on their systems and manage a subscription on usage. Probably some typical SaaS subscription models would work.
And the SaaS then gets the photographers paid. This doesn't need blockchain at all for the currency aspect, just to ensure proof of owner on the images. There are probably other ways to do that though.
Well photogs don't need protection from paying customers and there are already ways to sell your photos. Where they really get screwed is when someone who's not paying uses the photo, then the 'corporate layer' sends a cease and desist or possibly a DMCA take down depending on the situation.
What you're talking about is keeping honest people honest, so proof of work is just waste, a central DB and a billing system is fine for that.
Yeah could be, My guess is they've been late to the party on everything for the 25 years and someone conned them into showing up on time for this one and it turns out the parties a dud.
It's worse. There are two possibilities for how this works, neither of which bode well for the future of KodakCoin
1. Registration of an image's IP rights is automated.
Users will be able to claim the IP of images which they do not own, and use the system to fraudulently siphon payments from the true owners. KodakCoin would be enabling and cooperating in selling fraudulent IP licenses.
2. Registration of an image's IP rights is not automated.
If every image needs manual human intervention to be registered, not only is this not a decentralized system, but the costs to administrate the system will scale directly proportional to growth. Unless the average image generates more profit than the cost of human administration needed per avg image, the more popular KodakCoin becomes, the faster it loses money.
If you could somehow manage to make the proof of work tied to discovering copyright infringements (from crawling the web), and have the rewards come from lawsuits/settlements, then maybe it could work? It seems like a stretch for that to be possible, especially considering any rewards would be dependent upon the lengthy legal system.
But judging from the ridiculousness of the diagram in the article, I feel like this is not so well thought out.
So they can pay money to Kodak for the hardware needed to mine their 'coins' and not even get the hardware, just be stuck in a two year lease burning electricity night and day to create these comically funny not-even-sh1t-coins.
Some respect can be given to those that find many greater fools, take their money and pull off a classic scam, e.g. the Tether incident, brilliant in its crookedness.
However this Kodak effort is a joke. Kodak are not in master scammer league and they have an inflated ego regarding their brand worth yet at the same time shaming that brand quite badly.
It is as if it is a parody told to a boss that didn't do deadpan, maybe German was the first language. I know people are gullible however:
Kodak's January 9, 2018 announcement of KodakCoin and the KodakOne was accompanied by its announcement of the Kodak Kashminer cryptocurrency mining system. The Kodak-branded "Kashminer" rigs would be available for two-year leases and allow owners to mine for cryptocurrency, a focus in Kodak's currency pivot.
However it is definitely 'with' and not 'at' for everyone else that learns of this. Have they gone mad? What next, pivoting into homeopathic remedies? Rhododendrons or KodaTulips?
The incentive would be to get tokens that they in theory could exchange for money on exchanges. The token's value would be determined by the free market, or by the incentives they talk about in the article:
> "...such as a share of KodakOne’s revenue and access to a “marketplace” that will allow them to spend their KodakCoins on camera equipment, studios for photo shoots, and travel expenses."
Seems to me like some people can't understand the difference between tokens and blockchains.
But maybe they do and thought "Well, a blockchain is a good idea to track photo ownership AND people make mad bucks with crypto currencies at the moment, we can offer a something that has to do with photos and make big money on the side"
Is there truly a meaningful difference between tokens and blockchains though? Sure, the token is running one level up in the architecture hierarchy, using a blockchain or maybe even another token as its settlement layer, but from a user's perspective it doesn't act any differently. It's kind of like how, as a user, I don't know or care whether the HN webserver my browser is talking to right now is running in a VM or on bare metal.
The actual use properties of tokens/coins/blockchains aren't any different.
This is a problem with many blockchain ideas. On one hand you get an immutable public record (and smart contracts), but on the other hand you need an incentive to use and mine the network...thus the in-built currency. But if that currency isn't seen as valuable...then the whole system falls apart.
I'm not sure why Kodak didn't piggyback of an existing blockchain like Ethereum.
The following truly describes the hype, the bubble, or the snake oily aspect of it. Investor beware!
"As investors seek to capitalize on the popularity of currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, a number of struggling companies have reversed their fortunes, at least temporarily, simply by adding “blockchain” to their names or announcing a new cryptocurrency venture unrelated to their previous line of work. (The most notorious example is Long Island Iced Tea Corp., a beverage company that tripled its value overnight after it rebranded itself “Long Blockchain Corp.”)"
After some googling I found a SV company that already does everything Kodak wants to do. Not saying there can't be competition, but storing data on the blockchain just isn't that hard...
My roommate does PR consulting in the cyrpto space, I've never heard more bullshit come out of one person's mouth. Seems like 3 months after each project he's talking about how bs that on was, but this new project is super legit.
As far as I know, yes. Kodak Alaris sells all of the Kodak brand still photography film, paper, and chemicals, as well as selling/managing/running the Kodak Moments app/website and the Kodak photo kiosks (such as can be found at Target stores in the USA).
I personally work in the Kodak Alaris division which makes Kodak branded (and now also Alaris branded) document scanners.
EDIT: to clarify that it's still photography film that Kodak Alaris sells under the Kodak brand.
Parent said puts, and (assuming they bought puts) that means they think the price will down. Which is why I’m confused by the post: you won’t be posting on HN because...you’ll be busy rolling in a bathtub of money in March?
If parent sold puts, well, maybe they should stick to S&P index funds.
I think we have a shortage of risk-taking in the corporate world, especially when the gamble has an obvious profit-seeking motive, and I think that's unfortunate.
Whatever happens, a lot will be learned from this initiative.
Perhaps this story is why Kodak is down 15% this morning, and trading halted at one point? Can’t find any news about it, other than Kodak hit a circuit breaker.
Those April puts I bought are looking better every day.
Blockchain, as well as providing an effective means to track the publication history (i.e., licensing) of any given photograph, also provides a less obvious benefit to counter a more insidious problem faced by photographers: detecting when an original photograph has been modified by Photoshop and, only then, infringed. Blockchain can provide unimpeachable evidence of its provenance by its creator.
Nevertheless, despite what Kodak's CEO naively implied, infringement is NOT a photographer’s greatest problem. I can state that fact authoritatively, with decades of experience in the Commercial Photo marketplace, including behind the camera, with both empirical experience and having executed the most extensive customer development exercise ever seen in this industry.
Blockchain (in photography) is a FEATURE, not a business. But for the sake of argument, let’s say that it IS the major problem. In that case, if you are a photographer who has discovered your copyrighted photograph has been infringed (whether you found out via blockchain or another already-in-use technology), how do you expect to get paid, to be made whole? Do you suppose the process will be any easier, or different, just because of blockchain? Isn't that Kodak's rationale for its foray into blockchain?
An infringer, once discovered, will most likely ignore your payment demands, irrespective of whether or not you can prove copyright ownership. (Copyright ownership is implicit , anyway.) You have little or no legal recourse because it costs too much for most photographers to hire a lawyer to sue the infringer. The only way a lawyer will take your case on a contingency basis is if you have already filed a FEDERAL COPYRIGHT REGISTRATION. Registration is the key to the courtroom. It mandates a $150,000 statutory fee — i.e., backed by federal law — for each infringement of each individual use of a photograph. Now, that's a deterrent!
There is nothing in Kodak’s or anyone else’s blockchain business model to account for getting paid by copyright infringers. Moreover, no wannabe player in this game has put forth a business model that will attract PROFESSIONAL photographers to contribute their content to the stock photo pipeline in the first place.
How do I define "professional" you ask, and why is that important? Simple: any photographer who has already been trusted & hired by major brands & media companies to shoot commissioned jobs. That excludes about 99% of every contributor to the stock photo pipeline. But pros are the photographers from whom buyers want to license content because, right now, they complain that content sources are stale, bloated, and overused. (That's a whole 'nother topic.)
But there is a BIGGER reason why blockchain is a dead end — AS A BUSINESS, not a feature — specifically in photography. As it represents a “distributed” model, blockchain antithetical to the idea of a centralized source of curated content — the very kind of content Enterprise buyers demand. From the contributing photographer's pint of view, it gives them no individual market reach; no connection with customers. As for allowing photographers to set their own prices . . . HA! That IS their biggest problem. They have no idea how to do it. Blockchain may work in a consumer-retail marketplace, but not Enterprise. And Enterprise is the larger segment in Commercial Photo, albeit grossly underserved.
By "Enterprise" I specifically exclude the market currently served by Getty Images, Shutterstock, and Adobe Stock et al., which is comprised of shopkeepers, freelancers, and startups, all looking for cheap pictures to fill up their Web sites. But if your are one of that ilk of photo vendors, your business model is pile 'em high and sell 'em cheap. That means you have to sell the same picture over and over again at radically low prices to MANY DIFFERENT BUYERS to hit your revenue projections. But that's bad for buyers with a brand identity to protect. (There are a number of other, equally important reasons.)
Minority ownership in a random company owned by a former fraudster and 3% of the tokens with their own name on it? So many things wrong with this. Where is the secret deal that made this happen? Did the Kodak CEO get 40% of the tokens in his personal wallet? For a multi-decade, legacy brand to entrust that guy with their future is rather bizarre. If this fails, it is quite possibly the last nail for Kodak..