Dear digital artists and collectors,

in the second part of my series about "Art and Blockchain", I want to tell you about another great artist, who is using blockchain technology to manage and sell digital artworks.

XCOPY ART

Regarding to his tumblr, XCOPY is a " London based long time gif artist."

I'm selling rare, limited, digital editions in the CRYPTO ART EDITIONS section. These editions have been tokenised through ascribe.io using the bitcoin blockchain. The tokenisation assigns each edition a unique cryptographic ID, enabling them to be traded or transferred. Every edition comes with a certificate of authenticity and complete ownership history - accessible through ascribe.

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I discovered him on twitter, where he constantly tweets cool GIFs, that are available for purchase. Some of them are also available at his homepage:

I was particularly attracte by this GIF called "Jesus Mob":

As you can see in the description, the artwork is published as an edition of 100 and you're able to buy it directly using cryptos:

It was even exhibited at Tribe17, a "Free International Art Festival".

This is a family friendly ‘living exhibition’ encouraging cross-disciplinary creative collaboration and offering free access to ALL activities and experiences. If you see something you like, 150 of the visual artists will be participating in the art sale section of the festival, giving you the opportunity to take some of this experience home.

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Coinbase Commerce

OK, I wanted that one! Clicking on "Click here to buy this artwork" brought me to a coinbase commerce form, where I had to input my email address.

Coinbase Commerce is a service to easily accept several different crypto payments for your business.

I was able to select, if I'd rather like to pay with BTC, BCH, ETH or LTC. After I successfully sent 15$ worth of ETH and the transaction was confirmed on the network, I received a payment receipt in my email account.

Shortly after, I got an email from a website called ascribe.io:

Ascribe.io

Just like the bitmark blockchain, I discussed in the first part of my series, ascribe.io is a blockchain based service for issuing and managing digital goods. It is powered by an overlay of the bitcoin blockchain called SPOOL (Secure Public Online Ownership Ledger) and based in Berlin.

ascribe is a service that empowers creators to truly own, securely share and track the history of a digital work. [...] and enables buyers to collect and truly own your digital work. With ascribe, selling digital property is as easy as selling physical property. ascribe allows you to transfer intellectual property (IP) to someone, anywhere in the world, simply by email.

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Clicking on the "View" button brings you to a special ascribe page. I you haven't signed up there before, you would need to create an account to claim your new digital artwork.

As you can see, you can not only view the creator and owner of the artwork, but also can perform several actions, like download, transfer, consign or loan the piece.

Loaning a work means granting someone a temporary license for specific range of dates. A typical example is a loan of an artwork to a museum for an exhibition. You can also rent your work: it’s just a loan, but you charge money.

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Certificate of Athenticity

Along with the artwork comes a very cool "Certificate of Athenticity":

Ascribe any File Format

The cool thing is, that you can register and sell any digital file format with ascribe:

Any and all file formats are accepted. We use the browser to render images, movies, audio files and more. If the browser cannot render your file, you can still use the download button to access the file.

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You can even register physical works by uploading a photo of the object and then track the ownership history using ascribe.

Licenses & Rights

When you transfer a file, you can also specify the rights that you transfer. That means, you as the copyright holder can limit the rights of the digital edition.

For instance, it can be as simple as “I transfer this file to you with the rights of use, modification and resale. You are explicitly prohibited from sharing this design in a public space.” This “contract” is then locked into the provenance of the work and will serve as sufficient evidence. Our Terms of Use also sufficiently cover standard licensing usage, so when your recipient opts in to use ascribe, they are also agreeing to standard terms.

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If you don't limit the buyer's rights, the legal terms of ascribe become effective:

The Seller agrees to give the following rights to the Buyer in the contract between them:

• Private or public display of the Edition by the Buyer or a third party acting on behalf of the Buyer;
• Charging a fee or admission to view the Edition
• Displaying the Edition in Public, including display on public Internet sites (e.g. on tumblr.com) as long as the display includes attribution and a link to the creator or rightsholder’s website, when available;
• Downloading or making backups of the Edition, or using it as intended by the creator.

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That does not mean, that the seller agrees to give the buyer copyright of his work.

Creative Commons

As a huge fan of Creative Commons, which I constantly support through my @creative-commons account at Steemit, I was suprised to read, that ascribe can even be used to register works under Creative Commons.

CC licenses are an easy-to-use way to let people use your work for free, with some conditions on that use (e.g. requiring attribution). But CC licenses on their own don’t have a secure way to record attribution. ascribe allows attribution to be recorded and tracked. Think of us as the missing half of CC. Even if you want to let people use your work for free, you can use ascribe as a way to timestamp ownership using cc.ascribe.io.

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Downside

Regarding to the ascribe twitter account, ascribe is "not under active development or support." But the underlying SPOOL layer is released under a Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 3.0 license and there is also an API, so that anyone could start building an app using it. Also, as the ownership information is stored in the Bitcoin blockchain, it will remain readable, even if ascribe would be shut down.

XCOPY even told me in an email, that he would send me "some equivalent artwork on another blockchain", if "the site goes up in a puff of smoke one day", which is really a nice move, but won't happen IMHO.

TL;DR

I had a seemless and enjoyable buying experience of a great digital artwork through Coinbase Commerce and ascribe. Ascribe looks a lot more stylish than Bitmark and the nice "Certificate of Athenticity" makes it my #1 choice to register digital editions of my artworks.

XCOPY Links

Please check out the twitter, tumblr and homepage of XCOPY for more great (glitch style) GIFs. He's also at Steemit, you should follow his blog @xcopy ! It would be cool, if he'd also accept Steem/SBD in the future.

Bonus

Like in the first part of my series about "Art and Blockchain", I want to give you the opportunity to check things out by buying one of my digital artworks called "Zero Knowledge":

It's an edition of 10, but the first one is already sold. So, if you want to own one of the first digital artworks, I registered at ascribe, you can send me 2 Steem/SBD to my account (@shortcut) and add your email in an encrypted memo. (You can encrypt the memo by adding a # followed by a space in front of the memo.)

For example # For 1 'Zero Knowledge' artwork. Here is [email protected]

Big thanks in advance!

@shortcut - art & crypto