Magma - Empowering Artists to Take Control of their IP

In the digital age, creativity moves faster than ever, and the next mega franchises will likely be born out of a collaborative and iterative process rather than a top-down, siloed approach. This leads to growing pains in the creator community: How will they be attributed and compensated when the open nature of the Internet breaks the traditional studio approach? Magma’s collaborative art platform addresses these challenges by allowing their 3M+ creators to register, share, and expand their intellectual property using Story’s programmable IP infrastructure.

Story provides the IP backbone for Magma, aiming to be a leading platform for the future of digital art with baked-in capabilities for provenance, licensing, and new monetization models in the age of AI.

These IP-centric applications represent a paradigm shift from what’s currently the Wild West of digital art, guiding what is becoming a digital renaissance, where creators and users benefit alike. Registering art on Magma as programmable IP transforms static art pieces into building blocks of creativity, allowing clear ownership claims, better discovery mechanisms, and active control of how AI companies can use their assets.

Giving Artists Control and Provenance

As the Internet has expanded, digital collaboration on art and IP has grown exponentially and, as a result, it has become increasingly difficult to trace the origin of derivative works or the true ownership behind assets. Magma addresses this by allowing artists to register their work, setting clear attribution via a neutral, global IP registry that anyone can access, along with tools for creators and IP holders to set the rules of engagement, e.g., commercial licensing, non-commercial remixing, and usage of their art, including setting clear terms for AI usage or proactive opt-out.

Accessibility is a key principle of Story's design. Budding artists shouldn't spend time and resources figuring out how these pieces work together. Magma demonstrates how platform-side complexity can be reduced, allowing creators to:

• Protect their IP
• Prove ownership of their artwork
• Verify their art is a completely original creation (no AI usage)
• Easily register multi-author assets with a clear ownership split
• Collaborate with clear attribution and royalties
• Publish, monetize, and share their art
• Track their art’s evolution via IP graphs

Magma is empowering its creators with collaborative tools, leveraging the power of blockchain authenticity to protect and expand their IP via Story.

Let’s look at an example of how Magma provides new tools to creators by allowing artists to register their assets as IP on Story.

Community Remixing

Today, art pieces are scattered across the Internet, making it difficult to identify original creators, track contributions to remixes, and discover derivative works.

If you’re a creator on Magma, you can open your art for community remixing, which can have powerful network effects. Users can track who has remixed their IP, and what they’ve created, thanks to Story’s IP Graph. This is powerful tooling to trace and explore how what you’ve published expands and grows over time.

To illustrate this idea, let's say hello to Magma’s mascot Pyro, a friendly flame at the heart of their branding:

What if the Magma team opened up the Pyro IP to remixing and engaged with their community? Perhaps they could hold a contest for users to draw Pyro in the style of iconic artists like Vermeer and Van Gogh?

Creators can flag their art for remixing directly in Magma’s interface in just a few clicks, without needing to understand the underlying technical architecture. Once published, the original creator and all additional contributors are credited with a percentage of ownership for the newly published remix (in this example, Pyro drawn in the style of The Scream). The original owner can also set rules allowing only non-commercial remixing, without having to worry about diluting their brand. Ultimately, as time passes, the amount of remixing done to a single original work on Magma will grow, and Story will power attribution for all creators involved. This is a major step in opening up original artwork to collaborative creation, incentivizing creators to work together to grow a franchise instead of fighting for recognition and compensation in a zero-sum way.

Now, imagine a community takes any original character published on Magma and remixes a variety of outfits, art styles, and fresh takes on them. Suddenly, there’s a booming home not only for fandom, but for creators to find inspiring IP to apply their craft to. The growth potential becomes exponential.

An Onchain Future

Remixing is just the beginning of how Magma will leverage Story to elevate its platform. The future is community-first, bringing more features and ways for creators to protect and grow their creations as IP holders of original art. Existing franchises can engage with their fan in new ways that were not possible before, channeling their creativity. New projects can leverage the expansive community to grow their franchise.

Combining Magma’s evolving suite of collaborative tools with Story makes Magma one of the most innovative homes for artists. Thanks to Story, creators will be able to keep tabs on how their art evolves on Magma and beyond, and artists looking for an all-inclusive home to launch their IP will be able to build alongside like-minded communities.

Transforming static assets into programmable intellectual property through Story will add a new searchable, liquid, and modern layer to creativity. Magma is democratizing access to intellectual property and licensing to their millions of users via Story.