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Under such a system, a photographer would presumably have to register each photograph before hosting the image on her website, or risk losing copyright protecti

Under such a system, a photographer would presumably have to register each photograph before hosting the image on her website, or risk losing copyright protection. This seems extremely onerous for a wide range of creative professions.

ubernostrum 11y ago
Trying out variants of older approaches would probably work, though; a system which grants a short (say, 14 or 28 years, like the old terms were) term of copyright automatically, but requires registration to extend the term beyond that would solve the orphan-works problem, and allow people who really wanted to maintain copyright on their old photographs to just batch-register them at the extension date.
williamcotton 11y ago
This future photographer will use some specialized computer software that automatically registers every photograph that ends up on their own personal website. BTW, we're working on the underlying technology for this kind of stuff here: https://github.com/blockai/openpublish https://github.com/blockai/openpublish
- benjaminjackman 11y ago
  Is the idea here that an artist would first register their work on the blockchain, then publish it publicly? I've had a very similar idea to use something like that registy with a browser extension that catalogs every resource visited by a user (by the SHA-2 of it's content), what site referred / linked them to it. This will create a big list of consumed content. At the end of the year, the user can view their audit log (and metadata on it, e.g. how many minutes of a video they watched, how they rated it etc) and it will let them donate a certain amount of numbers from an atomically incrementing counter signed with keypair identity to the artists registered for those works and those that referrer them to the content. The donater could back keypair with a variety of identities (maybe something like a twitter account that takes into account how famous the donater is based on their followers etc or maybe through something like keybase that aggreates together several social media identities into a unique key). The donater could also back this counter with a certain amount of money or BTC or whatever (essentially acting as their own bank). This allows an referrers/artist to be compensated in both fame (the Sum of the amounts of count assign to them * the follower-strength of the person assigning the count at the time of assignment / the total count that person has assigned) which is useful for parlaying into advertisement backing and fortune (the total value of the count they were given). The artist/referrers can hold their count (speculating a rise in the value of that contributors count), can trade some portion to other's via the blockchain or back to the original donater in exchange for the backing amount. Obviously people can parasitically clone works and republish them, with minor content variations. Hopefully some sort of auditor could set what constitutes a new vs derived work and how the splits are calculated and to find duplication and attribute it back to the correct authors, it would be up to each donater to choose the auditor they want to use when making their donations. The expectation here is that artists would band together and choose to promote the auditors that do the best job of being 'fair'. Ultimately though, the choice on how to give money to the creators of content would be to the public and so auditors that favor regimes unlimited copyright and very restricted derivation would be less weighted than ones that pushed for creative derivative works.
toomuchtodo 11y ago
Oh come now. In today's age, this is not onerous. Flickr allows me to assign a Creative Commons license automatically to every photo I upload (with the ability to change it for each photo on the fly in the uploader). An extra API query is not killing anyone. And if you must host your own site, a Wordpress plugin could do this. Just as its not onerous for Amazon to calculate sales tax across the country with software, this is no different. Software, as usual, makes everything easier.

ubernostrum 11y ago

Trying out variants of older approaches would probably work, though; a system which grants a short (say, 14 or 28 years, like the old terms were) term of copyright automatically, but requires registration to extend the term beyond that would solve the orphan-works problem, and allow people who really wanted to maintain copyright on their old photographs to just batch-register them at the extension date.

williamcotton 11y ago

This future photographer will use some specialized computer software that automatically registers every photograph that ends up on their own personal website. BTW, we're working on the underlying technology for this kind of stuff here: https://github.com/blockai/openpublish https://github.com/blockai/openpublish

benjaminjackman 11y ago
Is the idea here that an artist would first register their work on the blockchain, then publish it publicly? I've had a very similar idea to use something like that registy with a browser extension that catalogs every resource visited by a user (by the SHA-2 of it's content), what site referred / linked them to it. This will create a big list of consumed content. At the end of the year, the user can view their audit log (and metadata on it, e.g. how many minutes of a video they watched, how they rated it etc) and it will let them donate a certain amount of numbers from an atomically incrementing counter signed with keypair identity to the artists registered for those works and those that referrer them to the content. The donater could back keypair with a variety of identities (maybe something like a twitter account that takes into account how famous the donater is based on their followers etc or maybe through something like keybase that aggreates together several social media identities into a unique key). The donater could also back this counter with a certain amount of money or BTC or whatever (essentially acting as their own bank). This allows an referrers/artist to be compensated in both fame (the Sum of the amounts of count assign to them * the follower-strength of the person assigning the count at the time of assignment / the total count that person has assigned) which is useful for parlaying into advertisement backing and fortune (the total value of the count they were given). The artist/referrers can hold their count (speculating a rise in the value of that contributors count), can trade some portion to other's via the blockchain or back to the original donater in exchange for the backing amount. Obviously people can parasitically clone works and republish them, with minor content variations. Hopefully some sort of auditor could set what constitutes a new vs derived work and how the splits are calculated and to find duplication and attribute it back to the correct authors, it would be up to each donater to choose the auditor they want to use when making their donations. The expectation here is that artists would band together and choose to promote the auditors that do the best job of being 'fair'. Ultimately though, the choice on how to give money to the creators of content would be to the public and so auditors that favor regimes unlimited copyright and very restricted derivation would be less weighted than ones that pushed for creative derivative works.

toomuchtodo 11y ago

Oh come now. In today's age, this is not onerous. Flickr allows me to assign a Creative Commons license automatically to every photo I upload (with the ability to change it for each photo on the fly in the uploader). An extra API query is not killing anyone. And if you must host your own site, a Wordpress plugin could do this. Just as its not onerous for Amazon to calculate sales tax across the country with software, this is no different. Software, as usual, makes everything easier.