Recently, I read about Wacom’s new initiative – Yuify.
I’ve long been a fan of the Wacom company – they produce quality and premium drawing pads and their patented pen technology is extremely impressive. This new initiative however, has more to do with digital artistic licensing than with physical drawing pads.
Yuify is made up of four components:
- a technology that utilises blockchain to generate a unique ID and a secret micromarking technique that embedds the ID into the image (possibly steganography)
- a public-facing website where people can upload an artwork or part of an artwork and check out which artist has done it and its licensing details
- an artists’ website where artists can log in and manage their yuify-ed artworks, generate license agreements, accept and manage license requests, even paid requests.
- an integrated application into major drawing programs which enables yuify after the work is completed (currently available on Photoshop via a separate free app, Rebelle and Clip Studio Paint), and which verifies whether your artwork is yuify-able (i.e. you actually worked on it)
Public beta is free and is here: https://yuify.com
The technology of blockchain and steganography is not new but not nearly accessible enough for the average artists, who opt for watermarks that are very easy to crop out or remove these days.
What is perhaps more impressive and long overdue is a platform that standardizes and helps artists create licensed agreements and manage them. There are a lot of thoughtful options that are presented for customising your licenses – simply check the few boxes for creating a creative commons license, check whether attribution is required, or check that the work cannot be used for drugs and political use.
In a world that is filled with ai art and blatant art theft, it’s become harder and harder to protect one’s artwork. This is the type of thought leadership that we need from companies – contributing value to the artistic community by protecting their customers.
The public beta is free now, but I would like to see it eventually growing into a subscription or paid service in the future, or potentially have some tiers for payments. I am excited to see where this could go – this could be very powerful as a digital database that could potentially standardise artistic licensing in multitudes of countries and help artists in court disputes.