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From my reading it sounds like this blockchain-based proof-of-copyright is a solution looking for a problem. IANAL, but from what I understand damages for copy

by acabal 11y ago

From my reading it sounds like this blockchain-based proof-of-copyright is a solution looking for a problem. IANAL, but from what I understand damages for copyright infringement are high. Today if an individual has their copyright infringed by a corporation, and that infringement is big enough to get a significant award, I think a plausible outcome is a lawyer helps them on contingency and arrives at some reasonable settlement. I don't think it's super hard to prove you created something around the time you say you did, and even if that fact is murky, corporations usually know what they did and didn't create and nobody wants a drawn-out legal battle; so a settlement is not an unlikely outcome. In the reverse case, as we all know corporations are not shy about suing individuals for infringing on copyright. In that case the corporation, with its huge legal power and ostensibly better documentation, typically extracts whatever they wish from the infringer (anyone remember the ruinous "settlements" for the RIAA file sharing lawsuits of the early 2000's?). If the corporation for some reason can't win, then it can consider the loss a cost of doing business. In cases where the infringer is unreachable (anonymous website hosted in Sealand), proof of ownership wouldn't be helpful anyway. What we need isn't some kind of super fancy digital copyright registry, what we need is copyright reform to bring balance back to the public good, away from megacorporations and the rent-seeking grandchildren of the grandchildren of the original creators; and a push back to requiring registration of copyright to be granted protection.

williamcotton 11y ago
> what we need is copyright reform to bring balance back to the public good, away from megacorporations and the rent-seeking grandchildren of the grandchildren of the original creators; I agree 100%! In the meantime, we can start in the private sector by building tools to assist the legal profession long before statutory law can catch up with current technologies. > From my reading it sounds like this blockchain-based proof-of-copyright is a solution looking for a problem. We've been working with these concepts for almost two years and to be honest we did spend a lot of time staring a solution looking for a problem. We've had a gut feeling that we were on to something and luckily in the last six months or so we've found a number of customers, both in the legal services industry and in individual authors, that have helped guide us towards the service that we're now offering at https://blockai.com https://blockai.com We already have paying customers! > and a push back to requiring registration of copyright to be granted protection I disagree. People need to be able to find the copyright owners in a central registry so we don't end up with the problems surrounding orphan works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works > In cases where the infringer is unreachable (anonymous website hosted in Sealand), proof of ownership wouldn't be helpful anyway. This is really an article into itself, but Open Publish really wants to explore the idea of "code as law". If you use honorable software that enforces notions of intellectual property for users, then all users who use honorable software will be enforcing any notions of intellectual property. I'll give a really rough example using music. People can choose to use Spotify, which is honorable software, in that it honors existing IP contracts, or they can choose to use dishonorable software like The Pirate Bay, which chooses not to honor existing IP contracts. BitTorrent itself is just a distribution technology and it is completely agnostic to the concept of ownership. Open Publish is just decentralized accounting software that is completely agnostic to the concept of distribution. Both are completely agnostic to the existing legal systems in which they operate. BitTorrent can be used legally by Blizzard to push out updates or it can be used illegally by The Pirate Bay to infringe on copyrights. As long as we can make easy to use software that is legally valid, we expect people will choose to use the honorable software. In any case, legal pressure causes illegal sites to do things that harm customer experiences. At some point people seem to decide to subscribe to services like Netflix instead of trying to figure out why Popcorn Time stopped working. The Pirate Bay could build a system using Open Publish that also honored the existing IP contracts and directed payments to the rights-holders while continuing to use BitTorrent for distribution, but only if all of those rights-holders had already registered their works with Open Publish, which is one of many reasons why Blockai is currently focused on the registration process. By using Bitcoin or other blockchains we can take advantage of its decentralized consensus properties and can build honorable software that is open, transparent and equal-access. Spotify might be honorable software but it is most definitely closed, opaque and has very uneven relationships across individuals and corporations. We think we can all figure out a much better solution.
- acabal 11y ago
  I don't think "honorable software" is a great idea. Laws and social mores change all the time, but software could be forever. What if, in the 70s, the first creators of Unix tried to make it "honorable" by baking in DRM restrictions? DRM restrictions "enforce the notion of intellectual property for all users", but I and many others consider it terminally abhorrent to the concept of user freedom and general computing. Imagine a world where you could only grep a file on your system if the file's intellectual "owners" allowed your system to do so. Such a world would have never seen the open source computing revolution we're living in now. Gay marriage was illegal until just recently. Would "honorable" wedding planning software compiled in the year 2001 explicitly reject gay couples, not because of the developer's personal preferences, but because their union was against the law at the time? By my reading of your definition, then yes, that's what "honorable" software would have done--enforce the day's law on the user on the justice system's behalf. I'd go even so far as to say that "code as law" is an extremely dangerous concept that conflates the uncaring lockstep precision of a mathematical system with the messy, changing, and imprecise reality of human law and justice. Humans must enforce their own laws, not machines, and thank God we have judges and juries, not algorithms. No, "honorable" software is not a useful target. Better to make general-purpose software, agnostic of today's laws and mores, in the spirit of empowering users to use that software as a tool in whatever way they deem useful--not in whatever way you thought was "honorable" at the specific time of compilation. The software I use is my tool, not my overlord.
  - williamcotton 11y ago
    >What if, in the 70s, the first creators of Unix tried to make it "honorable" by baking in DRM restrictions? DRM restrictions "enforce the notion of intellectual property for all users", but I and many others consider it terminally abhorrent to the concept of user freedom and general computing. Imagine a world where you could only grep a file on your system if the file's intellectual "owners" allowed your system to do so. Such a world would have never seen the open source computing revolution we're living in now. The kind of baked-in enforcement DRM that you're talking about is very different than the honorable notions I'm talking about. Royalties were also called honorariums for a reason. The publisher who is sharing profits with the author is honoring their intellectual labors. The idea is not to restrict information flow but to promote equitable financial activities. This is already how platforms like Spotify work but the mechanics are opaque and dysfunctional, if not only because they're built on mechanical notions from the 20th century. That means, if I make something, register it, and then I sell 20% of my ownership to someone else, if the software that you write looks up who the owners are in the registry and then pays out directly to the listed owners, then your software is honoring the contract agreeing to the exchange of ownership in intellectual property. I'm not at all talking about a situation where software will stop people from acting in certain ways, rather just talking about ways in which software can facilitate our existing systems of intellectual property through the public sharing of information about assets and their transactions between private owners. >I'd go even so far as to say that "code as law" is an extremely dangerous concept that conflates the uncaring lockstep precision of a mathematical system with the messy, changing, and imprecise reality of human law and justice. Humans must enforce their own laws, not machines, and thank God we have judges and juries, not algorithms. "Code as law" is how Spotify, YouTube, or Facebook already work. They are software applications that adhere to the law and already engage in legal profit making and trade. I'm not suggesting that code should ever be used in place of the existing legal systems! I'm just talking about public accounting software running on a decentralized consensus engine! You're reading way too much in to what I'm saying here. Straw-men abound. > Better to make general-purpose software, agnostic of today's laws and mores, in the spirit of empowering users to use that software as a tool in whatever way they deem useful I agree 100%! But there is room for software to interface with the legal process. It's called a separation of concerns. I wouldn't want BitTorrent to have any concept of digital ownership. That doesn't mean we can't build modular code that does have a notion of digital ownership while also adhering to the BitTorrent protocol. If you'd like to email me at my HN username at gmail, I'd be happy to have a phone or a FaceTime conversation so we can both better explain our positions. I'm not exactly sure what your response has to do with what we're working on but I'm sure we could figure it out pretty easily with a friendly conversation! > This is really an article into itself It's understandable that you misinterpreted me because I didn't define the terms nor the context for "honorable" and "enforce". If I had instead chosen to write an article I would have positioned these against the kind of "rootkit DRM" notions from the Slashdot era that you're assuming I'm in support of. I'm working on another article that explains these concepts with more clarity. :)

by acabal 11y ago

williamcotton 11y ago

> what we need is copyright reform to bring balance back to the public good, away from megacorporations and the rent-seeking grandchildren of the grandchildren of the original creators; I agree 100%! In the meantime, we can start in the private sector by building tools to assist the legal profession long before statutory law can catch up with current technologies. > From my reading it sounds like this blockchain-based proof-of-copyright is a solution looking for a problem. We've been working with these concepts for almost two years and to be honest we did spend a lot of time staring a solution looking for a problem. We've had a gut feeling that we were on to something and luckily in the last six months or so we've found a number of customers, both in the legal services industry and in individual authors, that have helped guide us towards the service that we're now offering at https://blockai.com https://blockai.com We already have paying customers! > and a push back to requiring registration of copyright to be granted protection I disagree. People need to be able to find the copyright owners in a central registry so we don't end up with the problems surrounding orphan works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works > In cases where the infringer is unreachable (anonymous website hosted in Sealand), proof of ownership wouldn't be helpful anyway. This is really an article into itself, but Open Publish really wants to explore the idea of "code as law". If you use honorable software that enforces notions of intellectual property for users, then all users who use honorable software will be enforcing any notions of intellectual property. I'll give a really rough example using music. People can choose to use Spotify, which is honorable software, in that it honors existing IP contracts, or they can choose to use dishonorable software like The Pirate Bay, which chooses not to honor existing IP contracts. BitTorrent itself is just a distribution technology and it is completely agnostic to the concept of ownership. Open Publish is just decentralized accounting software that is completely agnostic to the concept of distribution. Both are completely agnostic to the existing legal systems in which they operate. BitTorrent can be used legally by Blizzard to push out updates or it can be used illegally by The Pirate Bay to infringe on copyrights. As long as we can make easy to use software that is legally valid, we expect people will choose to use the honorable software. In any case, legal pressure causes illegal sites to do things that harm customer experiences. At some point people seem to decide to subscribe to services like Netflix instead of trying to figure out why Popcorn Time stopped working. The Pirate Bay could build a system using Open Publish that also honored the existing IP contracts and directed payments to the rights-holders while continuing to use BitTorrent for distribution, but only if all of those rights-holders had already registered their works with Open Publish, which is one of many reasons why Blockai is currently focused on the registration process. By using Bitcoin or other blockchains we can take advantage of its decentralized consensus properties and can build honorable software that is open, transparent and equal-access. Spotify might be honorable software but it is most definitely closed, opaque and has very uneven relationships across individuals and corporations. We think we can all figure out a much better solution.

acabal 11y ago
I don't think "honorable software" is a great idea. Laws and social mores change all the time, but software could be forever. What if, in the 70s, the first creators of Unix tried to make it "honorable" by baking in DRM restrictions? DRM restrictions "enforce the notion of intellectual property for all users", but I and many others consider it terminally abhorrent to the concept of user freedom and general computing. Imagine a world where you could only grep a file on your system if the file's intellectual "owners" allowed your system to do so. Such a world would have never seen the open source computing revolution we're living in now. Gay marriage was illegal until just recently. Would "honorable" wedding planning software compiled in the year 2001 explicitly reject gay couples, not because of the developer's personal preferences, but because their union was against the law at the time? By my reading of your definition, then yes, that's what "honorable" software would have done--enforce the day's law on the user on the justice system's behalf. I'd go even so far as to say that "code as law" is an extremely dangerous concept that conflates the uncaring lockstep precision of a mathematical system with the messy, changing, and imprecise reality of human law and justice. Humans must enforce their own laws, not machines, and thank God we have judges and juries, not algorithms. No, "honorable" software is not a useful target. Better to make general-purpose software, agnostic of today's laws and mores, in the spirit of empowering users to use that software as a tool in whatever way they deem useful--not in whatever way you thought was "honorable" at the specific time of compilation. The software I use is my tool, not my overlord.
- williamcotton 11y ago
  >What if, in the 70s, the first creators of Unix tried to make it "honorable" by baking in DRM restrictions? DRM restrictions "enforce the notion of intellectual property for all users", but I and many others consider it terminally abhorrent to the concept of user freedom and general computing. Imagine a world where you could only grep a file on your system if the file's intellectual "owners" allowed your system to do so. Such a world would have never seen the open source computing revolution we're living in now. The kind of baked-in enforcement DRM that you're talking about is very different than the honorable notions I'm talking about. Royalties were also called honorariums for a reason. The publisher who is sharing profits with the author is honoring their intellectual labors. The idea is not to restrict information flow but to promote equitable financial activities. This is already how platforms like Spotify work but the mechanics are opaque and dysfunctional, if not only because they're built on mechanical notions from the 20th century. That means, if I make something, register it, and then I sell 20% of my ownership to someone else, if the software that you write looks up who the owners are in the registry and then pays out directly to the listed owners, then your software is honoring the contract agreeing to the exchange of ownership in intellectual property. I'm not at all talking about a situation where software will stop people from acting in certain ways, rather just talking about ways in which software can facilitate our existing systems of intellectual property through the public sharing of information about assets and their transactions between private owners. >I'd go even so far as to say that "code as law" is an extremely dangerous concept that conflates the uncaring lockstep precision of a mathematical system with the messy, changing, and imprecise reality of human law and justice. Humans must enforce their own laws, not machines, and thank God we have judges and juries, not algorithms. "Code as law" is how Spotify, YouTube, or Facebook already work. They are software applications that adhere to the law and already engage in legal profit making and trade. I'm not suggesting that code should ever be used in place of the existing legal systems! I'm just talking about public accounting software running on a decentralized consensus engine! You're reading way too much in to what I'm saying here. Straw-men abound. > Better to make general-purpose software, agnostic of today's laws and mores, in the spirit of empowering users to use that software as a tool in whatever way they deem useful I agree 100%! But there is room for software to interface with the legal process. It's called a separation of concerns. I wouldn't want BitTorrent to have any concept of digital ownership. That doesn't mean we can't build modular code that does have a notion of digital ownership while also adhering to the BitTorrent protocol. If you'd like to email me at my HN username at gmail, I'd be happy to have a phone or a FaceTime conversation so we can both better explain our positions. I'm not exactly sure what your response has to do with what we're working on but I'm sure we could figure it out pretty easily with a friendly conversation! > This is really an article into itself It's understandable that you misinterpreted me because I didn't define the terms nor the context for "honorable" and "enforce". If I had instead chosen to write an article I would have positioned these against the kind of "rootkit DRM" notions from the Slashdot era that you're assuming I'm in support of. I'm working on another article that explains these concepts with more clarity. :)