SharpShark: A Symbol-Powered Timestamping and IP Solution to Empower Creators

NEM Ventures has recently invested in SharpShark, a Symbol-powered timestamping solution that protects creators’ copyrights. SharpShark also enables the transfer and tokenization of intellectual property, and the auto monitoring of violations.

SharpShark’s mission is to detect plagiarism, eliminate copyright infringement, and give makers full control over their creations. Ultimately, the solution creates a fair and equitable decentralized solution for protecting intellectual property. SharpShark protects text and image copyrights – by timestamping, saving in full, and tokenizing intellectual property. Designed with the end user in mind, the solution can be leveraged by creators across industries, ranging from writers, academics and journalists to photographers, artists and designers.

In order to protect work, SharpShark publishes the digital signature of the text and images to the Symbol blockchain alongside the author details to prove authorship in compliance with GDPR policy. The data is then stored in immutable form.

Sasha Ivanova, CEO and Co-Founder of SharpShark, commented: “As long-standing members of the blockchain community, we’ve followed the NEM project for years, and the Symbol blockchain suits perfectly for intellectual property management. Symbol has a layered architecture that enables trustlessness, and performance optimisation, which was a natural fit for our solution. We’re excited to work with the NEM Ventures team to further develop our product, with the aim of making copyright and intellectual property protection more accessible and equitable.

SharpShark’s suite of use cases span media, academia and user-generated content platforms.

Media

Writers and journalists can detect plagiarism, prevent copyright violations and generate a portfolio of their intellectual property. This enables media outlets to monetize content by combining anti-plagiarism detection and timestamping into one unified solution.

Academia

Academics have the ability to eliminate academic misconduct and establish a priority of findings. The solution also tracks plagiarism, enabling institutions to track and punish plagiarizers as they deem appropriate.

Content Platforms

Creatives such as photographers, artists, designers can utilize SharpShark to prove authorship and effectively track their creations in one consolidated space.

SharpShark was founded by Sasha Ivanova, an IT-engineer, award-winning writer and one of CoinTelegraph Latam’s ‘Top-100 Blockchain Entrepreneurs’, and Valeriia Panina, a crypto native content designer and former Managing Editor of an analytical agency.

To-date, SharpShark has tested their solution with Cispen, the journalists’ union, and the project is currently participating in the Start-Up Chile Seed acceleration program.

To find out more, visit sharpshark.io and nemventures.io.

17 Likes

seems like a useful tool!

i just checked out the sharpshark homepage and stumbled up on this:

The certificate contains:

  • name & date of creation, recorded in the Symbol (NEM 2.0) blockchain.←
  • the full artwork is recorded in the IPFS (InterPlanetary File System). →

first point needs no explanation, however, i am interested in the IPFS solution

where does the “IPFS service” run? as i understand it is not part of Symbol (or am i wrong?) and thus i am interested where the files will be hosted

3 Likes

@spizzerb, thank you for this very important question.

Yes, you’re right. IPFS is associated neither with NEM nor any Blockchain at large: it’s an independent off-chain database. IPFS (interplanetary file system) is a distributed decentralized database. It’s destined to replace a centralized HTTP protocol. Just to make it simple the concept is very similar to torrent: getting pieces from multiple computers simultaneously.

The storage is in the IPFS node. It’s a different format that synchronizes each file hash with the other nodes of the IPFS network, in this way other nodes can replicate or find them in the available nodes.

Once a file enters IPFS it becomes immutable. For intellectual property protection is absolutely essential.

To prove the authorship and author needs to prove the time of creation, author’s name, title, form of the expression of the content, and to guarantee all this data immutability.

If we store the content both in Symbol Blockchain (with metadata) and distributed database IPFS, we will have proof of form, proof of time stamp, and proof of immutability. To protect the authorship has never been so easy.

IPFS (developed by Protocol Labs) and Symbol Blockchain with metadata is a perfect it for intellectual property.

4 Likes

thanks for the details! i have read some things about IPFS before and i think the tech is a good addition to blockchain tech.

when you talk about IPFS nodes, who runs those nodes? Is there only one “instance/pool” of IPFS nodes and every project which uses IPFS will rely on them or do you have to run your own nodes for your project?

1 Like

Usually all projects who use IPFS, install at least 1-2 nodes (as well as we in Shark).
There’re some big IPFS node pools (from Inf…a for example), but also a lot of independent owners.

2 Likes

Hello.

I hear a lot about IPFS but i have never had the need to use it.
Do the IPFS node owners get rewarded for running the node or
what motives are there to run the node beside using it by yourself?

Do you maybe know the following things about IPFS:

  • can a file be removed from the IPFS once is stored there?
  • is this system suitable for storing smaller of bigger files lets say few Gigabytes in size?
  • how efficient is the system when it comes to high number of requests for reading a file?
  • could it be subject to DDOS attack?

Thanks.

1 Like