Founded in Milan in 1882, SIAE (Italian Society of Authors and Publishers) is a public economic institution and membership base for the management of copyright, ranked sixth in the world ranking of companies collecting, as confirmed by the data of the Global Collections Report 2018, published by CISAC (Confédération Internationale des Sociétés d'Auteurs et Compositeurs). Every year SIAE releases more than 1.2 millions of licenses for the use of works protected by it, guaranteeing payment to authors and publishers the right compensation for their work. SIAE also supports the Italian cultural and creative industry with economic contributions for numerous artistic initiatives, and it is at the side of various social activities and solidarity.

SIAE is leveraging Algorand for the development of a new open ecosystem for copyright management that is made possible with Algorand’s high performance blockchain platform. SIAE had previously initiated the project on Hyperledger, but has shifted to the Algorand platform due its decentralized by design and scalable performance. As a first step on Algorand, SIAE has launched over 4 million NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens) to digitally represent the rights of nearly 100,000 creators. Digitizing these rights on a decentralized and transparent public blockchain is the first step for SIAE in building an open infrastructure able to protect author’s rights end-to-end, as envisioned by SIAE for the future of the industry.