It appears Bitcoin fanboys, who have lost big as the Bitcoin price collapsed and who tend to be anti-IP, may get bitten in the butt yet again, because blockchain technology may play an important role in preventing intellectual property theft..
George Howard writes at Forbes:
The Bitcoin Blockchain just might save the music industry...Via my work in the visual art world with Artgasm, the company the brilliant artist Ashley Longshore and I recently started, I’m immersing myself in visual IP.From the ascribe web site:
This led me to a company called ascribe. ascribe utilizes the Bitcoin Blockchain to, in their own words, “enable you to share your digital creations without worrying about losing ownership rights.”...
ascribe is focused on visual elements, however, the utility of this approach extends way beyond visual IP. Music, for instance, seems to me a prime candidate for this type of use-case.
Certainly, such a process would allow for the better trackage of usage of music, which would lead to more accurate compensation for rights holders.
For example, if I am a performer signed to a label, I could assign the rights to my Sound Recordings, and monitor – via the Blockchain – the ways in which the label exploits this Sound Recording (sales, licenses, streams, etc.). This would greatly reduce controversy (and related transaction costs – audit time/money) around royalty payments, etc. Similarly, the label/publisher (or – as I would encourage – artist) who releases the work could lend (i.e. license) the Sound Recording and underlying Composition to streaming services, broadcasters, etc., and monitor – via the Blockchain – the ways in which these rights (Sound Recording/Composition) are used.
In this manner a great deal of transparency would emerge...
Artists – visual, musical, or otherwise – really must educate themselves about these emerging technologies, or suffer the fate of being exploited by those who do.
ascribe is a service for artists, galleries and collectors to register, transfer and archive digital art. Users can claim ownership and have control over their digital property. ascribe allows artwork provenance to be verified, thereby strengthening the value proposition of digital art for the art market, collectors and archives.
With ascribe, you can truly own, securely share, and track provenance of digital work.
Artists upload their digital work to the ascribe Ownership Registry™, where a digital intellectual property entry is established. The digital work is securely stored in our cloud, and title to the work is credited to the artist. The entry is time stamped and each edition of a work receives a unique crypto-ID that is inseparable from the original...
How do you "own" something when bits can be copied freely?
It turns out that visionaries of hypertext foresaw this issue in the 60s. They even proposed systems to handle this. However, those systems were too complex and hard to build. By the early 90s, the simpler WWW had won, but unfortunately in its simplicity it left out attribution to owners.
The solution isn’t to lock down digital files with watermarking, fingerprinting or DRM – these have all been tried with varying degrees of success. They're all fighting the physics of bits.
We ask: can we retrofit the internet for ownership, in a way that reconciles the physics of bits?
The answer is, yes! It's a combination of establishing title, and providing visibility into usage. To establish title, we've built a blockchain-based ownership registry for digital property. It captures metadata about the file, the owner details and the chain of ownership throughout its lifecycle, giving each work a story and provenance.
Title is only half the picture. Visibility is key to truly owning something. You have the power to act when you know where your work is and how it's being used. So, we crawl the internet to identify where the registered works show up [in beta, just ask]. We use machine learning at scale to identify works even if they've been altered. Title and visibility are two sides of the ownership coin.
At ascribe, we're reviving the dream of ownership on the internet. We want to give everyone the power to own and control their intellectual property in the digital age.
I'm not sure, at this point, that ascribe technology can eliminate all theft of intellectual property, but it appears that it could be a powerful force in that direction.
Power to the creators!
-RW
So... here's the deal:
ReplyDeleteI will GLADLY pay the artists (or their agents) for a quantity of their music.
However, I may lose my copy due to a disc crash or whatever.
Also, I may have a second or third device (backup laptop, smart phone), on which I would like a copy of this work.
So, again, here's the deal. I would like a copy of this work, for which I will gladly pay, but I want it to be mine for life and I would like it available on any of my personal devices.
So, have I just described Amazon's cloud??
I read an article around a year ago saying something similar about the Blockchain itself, how it has numerous other uses outside currency...which I think is great. A form of identifying serialization certainly establishes a kind of "paper trail" that is similar to actual paper titles in bit/byte format...which is cool and a potentially great step forward in IP protection.
ReplyDeleteIf your copy of IP gets out into the general public and is copied over and over again there could be an accounting for that via the Blockchain if structured properly.
Btw RW, for what it's worth- I always thought it might be a good idea for you to post a certain amount of "redistributed" Daily Alert's allowed via a EULA.
I've only forwarded the DA once or twice(and I'm note sure what your policy is on that), but if you allowed subscribers say 3 to 5 forwards it gives you a chance for more subscribers while at the same time asserting that it is your IP.
It'll be interesting to see if the technology can withstand attempts to circumnavigate its tracking...IP theft is a huge industry with talented people constantly working to make it reality.
The technology isn't ready yet, but this hints in the direction of a solution to the IP problem. The reality is that IP will be useful to precisely the extent that it is economically defensible in a free market. The whole debate over IP need not go one step further than that, and we can shut down the whole argument in our circles. If it is economical to defend IP, then it will be defended. If not, it won't. Technology will dictate what is defensible and what is not.
ReplyDeleteAt a deeper level, you can simply intertwine a sort of marker into music that would be impossible to extract, and track the music readily anywhere on the Web. It is very possible technically, but it's probably a little ways out still. I don't think block chain tech is the way to do this - it will be more like encryption fundamentally.
Sounds like total BS to my educated ears (I am a security/cryptography expert, among other things). There is no such thing as unerasable watermark. There is no such thing as uncopyable file. And there's always that pesky analog loophole. Blockchain-based registry only works when parties are cooperating: you cannot force them to register the transfers.
ReplyDeleteClassical information is NOT property, and it does resist being stuffed into the idiotic IP framework. The whole effort to "tame" digital information is doomed - has always been doomed - for the same reason the efforts to build perpetuum mobile are doomed: the universe simply does not work this way. The best DRM of any kind could hope for is to inconvenience the users sufficiently to make buying more attractive. It cannot stop uncontrolled copying; and the copy protection-circumventing tools quickly become embedded into easy-to-use programs. Software industry learned it hard way - and learned to live without it, treating massive unauthorized usage as free demos; the "artists" are still clueless.