The IOTA Foundation has launched a new platform designed to transform the complex and often cumbersome process of securing and managing music rights for films. This initiative, developed under the European Blockchain Pre-Commercial Procurement initiative and funded by the European Commission, is a prototype solution called the IPR Marketplace platform.
The core of the solution is the Smart Contracts for Media (SCM) system, which replaces traditional manual negotiations with automated, transparent digital contracts. These self-executing agreements manage the terms and conditions of music rights transactions, ensuring fair and immediate compensation for rights holders. The platform integrates Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) to represent rights and obligations, enhancing transparency and traceability.
For a film producer, the platform streamlines a traditionally arduous process. Instead of navigating a web of stakeholders—collective rights management organizations, publishers, record labels, and artists—through lengthy manual negotiations, the producer can use the platform's digital tools. They can select predefined contract templates, make real-time adjustments, and finalize terms digitally. The contracts are then deployed on the IOTA Smart Contract Chain, ensuring immutability and security.
Payments and royalty distributions are managed automatically, with funds flowing seamlessly from the producer's Web3 wallet to the relevant stakeholders. Each work of art and its associated rights are encapsulated using NFTs, which contain unique identifiers pointing to detailed data stored off-chain via the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS).
In a related development highlighting practical use, an Italian musician recently demonstrated a simpler application of IOTA's technology. Using the name "Beginning Alps" on Reddit, the musician detailed how she used IOTA's Tangle to certify the authenticity of her music. The process involved creating a website, posting photos of the product with a unique ID, uploading the photo to IPFS, and then creating an IOTA transaction with the links inserted into the IOTA Explorer, effectively creating a digital certificate of originality.
