Italy’s largest copyright management institution moves to represent authors’ rights as NFTs on the Algorand blockchain

The Italian Society of Authors and Publishers (SIAE) in collaboration with leading blockchain platform Algorand, has announced the launch of a blockchain-based open platform aimed at improving rights management and global copyright protection.

The launch is a major win for cryptocurrency adoption since this is the first time that copyrights will be represented as digital assets. To this effect, over 4 million non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have been created on Algorand to represent the rights of more than 95,000 creators on SIAE.

Thanks to Algorand’s Standard Assets (ASA) functionality, a Layer-1 mechanism that enables the creation of various types of assets on the Algorand blockchain, the process of minting the 4 million NFTs took only a few hours. This is a testament to the blockchain’s robust, fast, low-cost, and secure framework.

SIAE is a major Italian copyright collecting agency. It was founded in 1882 and is currently ranked sixth in the world ranking of collecting companies. Every year, the agency releases more than 1.2 million licenses for the use of works protected by it. Algorand, on the other hand, is pioneering the creation of next-generation financial products and protocols. Both organizations have been working together since 2019.

While commenting on the launch, Gaetano Blandini, the General Manager of SIAE said:

Ensuring the protection of creativity has been SIAE's mission for 139 years, and this project demonstrates that our goal is to continue to guarantee it for the next 139 years… We are not interested in building technological infrastructures to generate profit. Instead, our goal has been and always will be to create value addition for our members. This is why we can afford to talk about open infrastructures and make all our know-how available to the community. Blockchain technology is definitely an interesting strand to continue exploring because of its transparency and efficiency – by design - features, which are fundamental for those who, like us, manage the salary of other people's hard work.

The copyright management agency strongly believes that creating and issuing NFTs to authors is the first step towards building a system that allows for increased transparency and the efficient management of creators’ rights.

For the uninitiated, a non-fungible token (aka NFT) is a token that represents something unique. It could be a physical item, a piece of art, a collectible, or in this case, copyright. No two NFTs are equal either in value or properties.