Po.et (POE) Review: Securing Intellectual Property on the Blockchain

Po.et is a unique and possibly groundbreaking blockchain platform that is being created as a way for content creators, publishers, artists and other creatives to both prove ownership of their content, and issue licenses to ensure they receive proper compensation for their work.

It looks at the management of intellectual property rights in a new and different way for the modern world. It will pick up where projects like Creative Commons and Shutterstock are unable to provide content creators with indelible proof of ownership and licensing.

In this short review, we will dig into the Po.et project and concept.

About Po.et

Po.et is an open source project being developed on the Ethereum blockchain by a Singapore based company known as Po.et Technology Ltd., and also supported by The Po.et Foundation.

Together they are looking to create an open, decentralized platform that allows for immutable time-stamped proof of the ownership of creative digital assets. The open-source ledger is used to store the metadata and ownership details of various creative works and digital assets.

It is the first non-financial blockchain, making it unique and groundbreaking. In addition to providing a means to prove ownership, it also keeps digital assets secure and anonymous, and ensures that any work stored on the blockchain cannot be claimed, edited or erased later by some third-party.

In addition to storing the digital assets, it will also use smart contracts to allow for the licensing and distribution of creative works with syndication, ensuring the proper owner of the asset receives compensation for their work.

As you can see from the Po.et roadmap the project is just at the beginning of its journey. Written content is now included, and the team has created support for Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal, with plugins available for all three content management systems. In the future the blockchain will add support for images, video and audio files.

What is Proof of Existence

If you want to understand Po.et and how it will revolutionize the publishing and creative worlds you’ll first need to understand Proof of Existence, because Po.et was built with Proof of Existence at its core. Proof of Existence was created in 2013 by Manuel Araoz as the first blockchain-based non-financial platform.

Proof of existence is a decentralized consensus mechanism that allows users to store any content, media or metadata anonymously and immutably on the blockchain, without storing the actual content.

It allows users to publically prove their possession of a data file at a given point in time, without revealing the actual data or their identity. The storage is timestamped, and completely safe and secure on the blockchain, with a hash of the file stored permanently as immutable data.

What About the Po.et Token (POE)

Po.et released an ERC-20 compliant token with the ticker symbol “POE”in a $10 million crowdsale in August 2017. The token was valued at $0.00637 at the time of the crowdsale, but as of May 18, 2018 the token has grown in value to $0.034908 for a roughly 500% increase.

The all-time high for the token value was $0.221729 on January 6, 2018. The decline has come in conjunction with a broad based bear market for cryptocurrencies. Because POE is an ERC-20 token it can be stored in any ERC-20 compliant wallet such as MyEtherWallet or Jaxx.

The top exchange for POE is Binance, but it can also be purchased at OKEx, HitBTC, KuCoin and other smaller exchanges.

Po.et Solves Digital Asset Problems

The team behind Po.et seeks to solve three main problems that internet based digital assets suffer from:

1. Ownership of the asset
2. Usage of the asset
3. The origin and history of assets

Ever since the beginnings of the internet digital content has suffered from difficulties in regards to intellectual property rights, copyright, and plagiarism. Some organizations such as CreativeCommons and Shutterstock have tried to address these problems, and have been partially successful.

However, the centralized nature of these platforms has meant they are not interoperable with outside platforms, and there is no quick and easy way to determine attribution, verify ownership, and license creative works.

Po.et will allow content creators to timestamp their assets on the blockchain, keeping the origins of the asset provable, certifiable, safe and secure. There are also plans to allow for an easy and clearcut method for creators to set licensing fees and accept payments right within the platform. Finally, it creates an open, worldwide platform that will make it easy for publishers to discover new and valuable content.

Po.et is leveraging the power of blockchain technology to ensure that digital assets can be stored, shared, analyzed, and even licensed fairly, provably and immutably. This should succeed in adding value to the publishing industry by creating trust between content creators, editors, publishers and consumers.

The major value propositions for using the Po.et blockchain and POE coins are:

Content Ownership

Content creators will be able to timestamp their creations, registering them to the blockchain and creating an immutable record of their existence. Because the Po.et blockchain is decentralized you can be sure your content remains verifiable, safe and incontrovertible as long as even one node remains operational in the network.

Licensing

Licensing and usage rights have been one of the major downfalls of the increasingly inexpensive internet, and its ability to share information. With content registered to the Po.et blockchain it will become possible to create and issue licenses in an automated fashion, and without the need for any third party company or organization.

Users would be able to choose a pre-existing standard license, or could create their own license terms. Payment, issuance and transfer of the licenses could all be automated via the use of smart contracts.

Creates Transparency

The Po.et blockchain would be the bridge between creators and the publishing or distribution network. In addition to creating an immutable storage medium, it also creates a truly transparent system of attribution with allows for the discovery of new content, and the validation of the ownership of the content.

Decentralized and Secure

Because Po.et is a decentralized network there is no single point of failure, nor any way for a single organization, company, or individual to tamper with or alter the data stored on the blockchain.

Cryptographic signatures and hashing the metadata being stored ensures that content remains secure. Additionally, the time-stamping and hashing provides irrefutable evidence of the cretion and integrity of the data.

Flexibility

Po.et is open source, allowing anyone to work with the source code and make additions of modifications to meet their needs. This gives immense flexibility, and third-parties are expected to add new modules and plug-ins to extend the functionality of Po.et as it evolves.

New licensing terms and types will be a given, and smart contracts will allow for an unimaginable array of new features.

Conclusion

The key objective of the Po.et project is to create a simple, streamlined method for immutably storing digitally created content. It also seeks to solve problems surrounding attribution, integrity, licensing, syndication and publishing.

Plans for the addition of smart contracts and the open source nature of the code allows for the infinite expansion of the platform, with new features by third parties extending the utility of the platform well into the future.

If successful, Po.et will allow content creators to maintain full control over their works, while adding transparency that makes it simple for publishers to locate new works. It will also provide income to creators through smart contract enabled automatic licensing.

Best of all, it will provide immutable proof of the origin and history of any creative works registered on its blockchain.