In short, the entire nature of how information is published and monetized.
There are numerous problems with the current ad-sponsored publishing systems with web content, but some of the more interesting ideas we're looking at deal more with the professional publishing industries around photography, music and books.
We were very excited to read this report from the Berklee School of Music that outlined a system very similar to what we've been building!
In addition to the aforementioned benefits, a compre- hensive, accurate database of music rights ownership information would provide a platform for new technol- ogies to be applied in potentially game-changing ways. We encourage the investigation of the use of emerging crypto-currencies, such as Bitcoin, and their underlying technology, Blockchain, as new royalty-distribution mechanisms for the music industry.
...
A database of accurate rights ownership information, like the one we have proposed, could form the founda- tion of a similar cryptocurrency log. In addition to rights ownership information, the royalty split for each work, as determined by a mixture of statute and contracts, could be added to the database. Each time a payment is generated for a given work, the money would be auto- matically split according to the set terms, and each par- ty’s account would instantly reflect the additional reve- nue. For example, suppose a song is purchased from a digital music store, such as iTunes. After the store takes its cut, for ease of demonstration, we will hypothetically assume the revenue generated by the purchase comes to US$1.00. This money would be split between the two different works contained in the song, with a 9.1 cent mechanical royalty going to the musical work, and the remaining 90.9 cents going to the sound recording.
Next, if the contract between the publisher and songwriter specifies a 75/25 split of revenue from downloads, the publisher would receive 6.825 cents and the songwriter would receive 2.275 cents. With an identical split at the record label, The label would receive 68.175 cents, and the recording artist would get 22.725 cents. The block- chain network could also further divide this 22.725 cents between the members of a band, if applicable.
This entire process would take place in less than one second, allowing all parties to access their money immediately after it is generated. Further, this payment system is fully trackable and would ensure that royalties are not held by third parties, such as labels and publish- ers, before being passed to the artist and songwriter. This would eliminate concerns about accidental or intentional underpayment of royalties. - Fair Music: Transparency and Money Flows in the Music Industry, p.27-28
Hey, thanks for the detailed and considered reply. So many of the proposals I see (including the slides in the main article) seem to be either technical plans without any obvious motivation (other than 'because we can'), or are people trying to use technology to magic away laws that they personally don't like. It makes me very cynical of it all at times :(
> people trying to use technology to magic away laws that they personally don't like.
Isn't this a good thing? If the law is unjust then technology will expose its weakness (copyright law for instance). If the law is just, it will be strengthened by being tested by technology and if it's applicable in new areas.
Law should not impede progress, progress should push law.
Bitcoin is an interesting technology because it showed up after the web and mobile consumer technologies had already spread to most of the planet.
These days it takes literally hours to put up a web application that would have taken many months to build in the early nineties, if not more!
There still isn't an existing technology stack to build these kinds of consumer friendly applications that take advantage of the properties of a decentralized, single-source of truth, public access database like the Bitcoin blockchain.
That means that everyone is having to first figure out what the technology stack is, where the interfaces are for the various systems and modules that comprise it, and the best practices for shipping working products.
We've been trying our best to publish what we've been learning and trying to find nice interfaces for our systems and modules, and in the process we've come up with Common Blockchain, an API interface for querying the blockchain and propagating transactions, and Common Wallet, an API interface for signing messages, signing transactions, and signing authentication tokens.
We've got a really simple implementation of a Common Wallet based on bitcoinjs-lib that does all the basics that we use mainly for automated test suites, but it is a fully functional Bitcoin wallet.
We've also got a Common Wallet interface that talks to the Bitcoin-QT or bitcoind JSON-RPC, meaning you can use the standard core wallet with all of our supporting protocols. There's also a Common Blockchain implementation for the JSON-RPC.
And there's a number of unofficial Common Blockchain wrapper for third-party blockchain APIs like Blockcypher, Chain, and Blockchain.info. We now use a Common Blockchain interface based on Blockcypher in production.
The main motivation for Common Blockchain was that we were tired of having to change our interface after a series of blockchain APIs we were using either went out of business or pivoted.
There are numerous problems with the current ad-sponsored publishing systems with web content, but some of the more interesting ideas we're looking at deal more with the professional publishing industries around photography, music and books.
We were very excited to read this report from the Berklee School of Music that outlined a system very similar to what we've been building!
In addition to the aforementioned benefits, a compre- hensive, accurate database of music rights ownership information would provide a platform for new technol- ogies to be applied in potentially game-changing ways. We encourage the investigation of the use of emerging crypto-currencies, such as Bitcoin, and their underlying technology, Blockchain, as new royalty-distribution mechanisms for the music industry.
...
A database of accurate rights ownership information, like the one we have proposed, could form the founda- tion of a similar cryptocurrency log. In addition to rights ownership information, the royalty split for each work, as determined by a mixture of statute and contracts, could be added to the database. Each time a payment is generated for a given work, the money would be auto- matically split according to the set terms, and each par- ty’s account would instantly reflect the additional reve- nue. For example, suppose a song is purchased from a digital music store, such as iTunes. After the store takes its cut, for ease of demonstration, we will hypothetically assume the revenue generated by the purchase comes to US$1.00. This money would be split between the two different works contained in the song, with a 9.1 cent mechanical royalty going to the musical work, and the remaining 90.9 cents going to the sound recording.
Next, if the contract between the publisher and songwriter specifies a 75/25 split of revenue from downloads, the publisher would receive 6.825 cents and the songwriter would receive 2.275 cents. With an identical split at the record label, The label would receive 68.175 cents, and the recording artist would get 22.725 cents. The block- chain network could also further divide this 22.725 cents between the members of a band, if applicable. This entire process would take place in less than one second, allowing all parties to access their money immediately after it is generated. Further, this payment system is fully trackable and would ensure that royalties are not held by third parties, such as labels and publish- ers, before being passed to the artist and songwriter. This would eliminate concerns about accidental or intentional underpayment of royalties. - Fair Music: Transparency and Money Flows in the Music Industry, p.27-28
https://www.berklee.edu/news/fair_music_report