Born In Academia, Custos’ Novel Blockchain Application Fights Movie Piracy

By April 23, 2016Bitcoin Business

Custos Media Technologies , a Stellenbosch, South Africa-based company that uses the blockchain to fight media piracy , marks one of the more unusual but interesting commercial applications of bitcoin. A pair of academics, G-J van Rooyen and Dr. Herman Engelbrecht, came up with the idea after working in “pre-commercial” research for the better part of the last decade focusing on real-world applications of cutting edge technology. G-J van Rooyen Engelbrecht and van Rooyen co-founded the Media Lab at Stellenbosch University that was specifically created for this type of research.

“We spent several years working on media distribution and content protection along with the Lab’s founding sponsor, Naspers,” van Rooyen told CCN . Naspers is a large multinational media corporation focused mostly on developing markets. “This gave us a very good understanding of how the world of digital media operates.” 2013: A Watershed Year

The pair followed bitcoin from its inception, but 2013 was a watershed year for the cryptocurrency. “It suddenly became very obvious that bitcoin has broken out of the ‘very interesting idea’ phase and has achieved traction as a ‘real-world’ technology,” van Rooyen said. “Also, the potential of colored coins, smart contracts and micropayment streams were just being realized. We decided to actively look at potential bitcoin applications, and especially at the ways it intersects with the Media Lab’s core research areas.”

In academia, you quickly learn that the romantic notion of sudden research breakthroughs and flashes of insight are mostly movie stuff, van Rooyen said. “Mostly, research is slowly pushing at the edge of knowledge, and making incremental contributions. You don’t have a chat with clever colleagues and suddenly ‘invent something.’”

But in van Rooyen’s and Engelbrecht’s case, that’s exactly what happened. An Epiphany Arrives

Engelbrecht was struck with the idea that the blockchain could be used to […]

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