If you’re an image creator, or a stock photography customer and you’ve been thinking about getting involved with the new
KodakOne you might want to think again.
The initial coin offering (ICO) of KodakCoin, that was supposed to launch on January 31st, has been delayed several weeks. In order to eventually license rights to images it will be necessary to use KodakCoins.
The delay is attributed to the extended process of verifying who of the the more than 40,000 interested investors will be allowed to purchase coins. During the pre-sale $8 million worth of KodakCoins were sold, but it is unclear how many coins that represents or how many coins will actually be offered in the ICO.
Kodak says they are “now moving into the ‘accredited investor’ phase,” and it will take several weeks to determine who will be allowed to purchase KodakCoins. To be “accredited” a person must have (i) an individual net worth, or joint net worth with his or her spouse, that exceeds $1 million or (ii) an individual income in excess of $200,000 or joint income with his or her spouse in excess of $300,000 for the last two years. Only the wealthy can participate.
It is unclear what the coins will actually be worth at the time of purchase, or more importantly, what they are likely to be worth when someone actually wants to license rights to use an image.
So far it hasn’t been explained how someone who wants to pay $50 or $100 USD to license rights to use an image will acquire the necessary KodakCoins to make such a purchase. How much premium will the purchaser need to pay to the wealthy Coin owner? How complex will such a transaction be? Will there be a minimum purchase of Coins?
Once the purchase is made, the coins will be transferred to the copyright owner. How will the copyright owner change the coins he has received into something he can use to buy food? What percentage of the value of the coins will need to be paid out in order to get spendable currency? Are the wealthy the only ones who make money in these transactions?
It should also be noted that it may be years before Kodak gets a site built where imagery can actually be licensed. They will also need to get enough image creators to participate in order to have a collection of images of sufficient size to make it worth a customer’s time to go to the site to search for images. So far they haven’t provided any explanation as to how this will occur.