NBA All-Star Baron Davis wants to democratize photography with blockchain — just don’t call it NFTs

See yourself at the Super Bowl, a sold-out concert, or a high-octane NBA game. The story unfolds, right before your eyes. But do you even watch? Probably not. Most likely you take a picture on your phone.

Photography and video have never been more central to sports, music and entertainment. But according to two-time NBA All-Star Baron Davis, they’ve also never been less respected as media.

“There was a time in America, during our renaissance, when photographers were as famous as celebrities, when they were treated as artists,” Davis said Decrypt in an interview this week. “I think they’re treated more like a commodity today.”

Davis hopes to change that. And he thinks he can do it with the help of blockchain.

On Friday at NBA All-Star Weekend in Salt Lake City, Davis will announce the creation of SLiC Images, a photography and video rights management platform powered by NFT technology. SLiC Images is a subsidiary of Sports Lifestyle in Culture, a platform created by Davis to facilitate the distribution and monetization of independent cultural content.

As Davis sees it, photographers—despite being central to capturing culture—are currently getting a raw deal from the companies that profit from their work. A few professional photographers sell images of sports games and live events through pre-existing deals with image libraries and media outlets, often losing the rights to future profits generated by these works in the process. Independent photographers, meanwhile, often have few opportunities to monetize their works while maintaining ownership.

The star athlete and entrepreneur has been experimenting with blockchain technology for the better part of a decade, and he’s confident he can change that paradigm with a blockchain-backed media platform. SLiC Images will allow creators to mark their works with unique digital signatures and license them for commercial use for clearly defined timeframes via a transparent bidding process.

“Now photographers as a collective can have ownership in the channels, relationships and partnerships created by their work,” said Davis. – They can benefit from it.

The project is being built with a $250,000 grant (a third of which has been disbursed so far) from NFT platform Mintbase, which operates on the NEAR blockchain. SLiC Images was selected as one of 16 projects funded through the Mintbase Grant program, which aims to support technically sophisticated NFT projects that may otherwise be overlooked by more mainstream funding sources.

“We were looking for people who want to go a little deeper, rather than the surface level world of the current NFT market – lots of candy machines and lots of PFP hype,” said Mintbase co-founder Nate Geier Decrypt.

Geier believes that NFT technology could have an immediate and far-reaching impact on the highly centralized world of image licensing.

“Someone takes a visual picture of a historical event. All kinds of people all over the world will have access to it immediately. Imagine being able to take that photo, add it to a permanent license, upload it to a marketplace, start a bidding war, auction it off and put it on a blog within five minutes, Geier said. “It’s just simple. It’s that simple.”

Smart contracts underlying SLiC-supported images and videos will also be adaptable to allow shared ownership; each party associated with a work will continue to receive royalties generated by it upon each resale.

However, despite NFTs being central to SLiC Images’ core function, Davis is hesitant to associate the controversial technology with his burgeoning platform.

“For a while, we definitely won’t call them NFTs,” Davis said with a laugh.

He might be on to something there. In the past year, amid the current bear market and numerous high-profile corporate collapses, crypto and NFTs have both taken a beating in public perception. Even if blockchain is the answer to photographers’ problems, Davis believes it may be trickier to sell people a useful product than to focus on that product’s technical makeup.

“I mean, it’s a picture. It’s a big picture… That’s definitely where we want to start is just explaining what it is and the utility behind it, rather than trying to explain the technology,” he said. “People tried to explain things from a technological point of view, and the culture hasn’t adopted it.”

SLiC Images is still under development, with no exact launch date. However, Geier and Davis hope to have a prototype of the platform ready for display at ETH Denver by the end of this month.