Here's a whitepaper from early 2015 that explores the challenges faced by digital artists and creators of the Internet, and points to a solution that is a combi

Here's a whitepaper from early 2015 that explores the challenges faced by digital artists and creators of the Internet, and points to a solution that is a combination of legals and technology. https://www.ascribe.io/app/editions/1iYjGaiKPSm3uw3bqZoTWBEkJQCaPHM4L https://www.ascribe.io/app/editions/1iYjGaiKPSm3uw3bqZoTWBEk... Abstract: One long-standing drawback to the Internet is the hidden ‘artist penalty.’ The very strengths of the Internet make it difficult for creators of digital content to be fairly compensated for their work. This paper describes our implementation and proposes a fix that makes it easy to control one’s intellectual property by constituting a new “ownership layer” on top of the existing Internet. The approach has two pieces: a registry with easy, secure legals; and visibility into usage / provenance of the content. The legals formalize existing copyright rights of digital objects, making them easy and fluid for a creator or collector to use, transfer or modify. The bitcoin blockchain is used to securely record ownership transactions that are impossible to later repudiate or manipulate. Internet-scale media search provides visibility into usage of the media by crawling the web, applying machine learning to identify similar or identical media, and subsequently reporting their existence and location to the registered owners. Taken together, these pieces constitute “ownership processing” – a simple tractable solution to make ownership actions of digital property universally accessible.