Episode description

If you follow photography industry news, two words that may have caught your attention recently are “Kodak” and “cryptocurrency,” and the fact that they were in the same sentence might just have caused you to sit up and click. There was an outburst of opinion filling the blogosphere after the January announcement that KODAK and WENN Digital had entered into a brand-licensing agreement to launch KODAKOne, an image rights management platform, and KODAKCoin, a photo-centric cryptocurrency.   

The worlds of cryptocurrency and blockchain, the distributed ledger technology supporting many virtual currencies, are arcane, but merging one of the most recognized brands in photography with these new platforms and adding into the mix a potential fix for the image licensing business brought not only a lot of opinion, but a good deal of confusion. On this episode of the B&H Photography Podcast, we hope to shed light on the situation and to do so we sit with the principals behind KODAKOne and experts on both blockchain technology and image-rights licensing.

We welcome Jan Denecke, the CEO of KODAKOne, and Volker Brendel, their CTO, to this discussion. We are also joined by attorney Andrew Hinkes, a professor at New York University and author of more than twenty articles on blockchain technologies and virtual currency, and Maria Kessler, the former president of Digital Media Licensing Association and an expert in stock photography and digital-image licensing.

Join us for this rousing conversation in which we get firsthand information on KODAKOne’s business plans, insight on how the blockchain will affect photographer’s interests, and a general sense of what we can buy with a KODAKCoin.

Guests: Jan Denecke, Volker Brendel, Andrew Hinkes, and Maria Kessler 

Host: Allan Weitz
Senior Creative Producer: John Harris
Producer: Jason Tables