Why the legal battle between Miramax and Tarantino matters for crypto

An article on the rise of the importance of privacy on blockchains.

With the recent news of the legal battle between Miramax and Quentin Tarantino on whether Mr. Tarantino is allowed to mint NFTs of script pages and other artifacts from the cult hit “Pulp Fiction” on SCRT, I thought it would be a good idea to write on the importance of this, and why the Secret Network is the next big thing in privacy.

Why is Miramax taking legal action?

The entire issue lays in whether or not Tarantino is breaking alleged copyright infringement laws and therefore breaking his contract with the entertainment company.

Why is this important? Because it can set precedent in the future over the rights to intellectual property minted as NFTs. Now, most contracts usually hold some sort of terms as to what’s shareable and able to be profited from. However, do NFTs also fall into this mix? This boils down to whether or not it’s possible to read between the lines enough to make a case that could go either way.

Now, if Miramax had a legal basis, wouldn’t they just silently shut it down in court or settle with Tarantino, or are they trying to set a precedent that favors big business, and not the artists? To that, I say — mint it.

Why is privacy important? (and is it often forgotten)

The most simple reason why privacy should be a right is that it enables people to determine how and for what our information is used for and how its handled — especially by large businesses. Controlling your privacy, therefore, enables us to safely and secretly have self-determination.

However with that pivot also comes the danger of privacy being used to hurt and cause damage, especially in regards to intellectual property, and this is why this case is so important as it will set a major precedent for the future.

What do you think, anon? — Is our right to privacy often forgotten?

The UN in 1948 said it shouldn’t be.

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks — Universal Declaration of Human Rights

How can Secret help us protect ourselves?

Now, how can SCRT help us protect this human right?

Let me tell you, anon.

Secret Network is an L1 built with the Cosmos SDK which enables it to use the Cosmos IBC to connect to other protocols. To enable data privacy, the protocol has three key technologies — key management, encryption protocols, and trusted execution environments (TEE) — which the validator nodes of the network are all required to possess.

TEE (hardware isolated from the main system, enabling a trusted environment — untamperable) makes sure that the aforementioned nodes are unable to view the data while processing it. That doesn’t mean that everything is private, as the ledger of SCRT is publicly visible for all to see — this means that SCRT achieves programmable privacy — secrecy when needed.

This is achieved by enabling tokens to be wrapped into a private equivalent token (SNIP-20) via a Secret Contract (Think smart contract, but secret, anon).

Secret contracts enable encrypted input, state, and output to be executed. Therefore enabling messages and data to be encrypted by the user. Thanks to TEE, outputs that are encrypted are only known to the transaction sender and to the contract itself.

Now, what does this enable?

It enables the user of SCRT to decrypt a wide range of data for any address in the Cosmos multiverse by creating a viewing key that designates who can read it.

I will end with a quote from the SCRT whitepaper

Fundamentally, we believe privacy is a human right. An overly centralized internet and giant data monopolies have jeopardized our privacy, our security, and our society. We must scale privacy preserving technologies that can help us confront and overcome these systemic risks. We must continue to push for better education surrounding individuals’ right to privacy.

Does it set a precedent?

If Tarantino goes ahead, it certainly does. It shows that the individual can push for privacy and that it should be an expectation that a creator has rights to his creation. Which in turn is key in enabling a decentralized future

“he’s the hero Crypto deserves, but not the one it needs right now.”