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Imagine a YouTuber who spends 100 hours creating a fantastic video. Shortly after uploading it, an automated scraper program downloads it and re-uploads it. Thi

by elwell 3y ago

Imagine a YouTuber who spends 100 hours creating a fantastic video. Shortly after uploading it, an automated scraper program downloads it and re-uploads it. This program has been running a while, and since (in this imaginary society) there is no copyright protection, no one cares that it was shamelessly copied, and thus this re-upload channel has built up 1M subscribers over the past few years. It makes $100K on the re-uploaded video. The original content creator makes $10 on their ?copy?. The original content creator happens to be a churchgoing government worker, thus their plight should be ignored: they're just being controlling.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
The original purpose was not to ensure that someone got paid. It was to ensure that certain people didn't get heard. As for the modern day, we need to find a way to separate the payment channels from the content distribution channels. They have different constraints, and by binding them together the content platforms have no choice but to place artificial constraints on the distribution channels, which means developing technologies that converge on censorship. Instead I ought to be able to find a chunk of bits lying around on a flash drive, play them, and have my player recognize the few hundred people who contributed to the creation of those bits. After a month or so, I'd have a list of a few thousand people, each with a percentage by their name. Supposing I've allocated $30 for content that months, at the end of the month my money goes directly to those people. That guy who scraped the video and posted a copy. He's doing one of two things: - helping propagate the original, so the original people end up getting paid from the file he hosted - obfuscating the source somehow, in an attempt to prevent the proceeds from going to the original creators In the former case, we should thank him. In the latter case, he'll get caught: it's pretty easy to prove that you had access to some bits before someone else did. When we catch him, we'll just annotate his obfuscated copy with a link to the original metadata, so payment flows are restored. This ought to even work retroactively. It's no more complex than what we're doing, with these third party content platforms trying to put handcuffs on our devices all the time. It's just a different model which we're not exploring because the existing model is in the way.

by elwell 3y ago

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago

The original purpose was not to ensure that someone got paid. It was to ensure that certain people didn't get heard. As for the modern day, we need to find a way to separate the payment channels from the content distribution channels. They have different constraints, and by binding them together the content platforms have no choice but to place artificial constraints on the distribution channels, which means developing technologies that converge on censorship. Instead I ought to be able to find a chunk of bits lying around on a flash drive, play them, and have my player recognize the few hundred people who contributed to the creation of those bits. After a month or so, I'd have a list of a few thousand people, each with a percentage by their name. Supposing I've allocated $30 for content that months, at the end of the month my money goes directly to those people. That guy who scraped the video and posted a copy. He's doing one of two things: - helping propagate the original, so the original people end up getting paid from the file he hosted - obfuscating the source somehow, in an attempt to prevent the proceeds from going to the original creators In the former case, we should thank him. In the latter case, he'll get caught: it's pretty easy to prove that you had access to some bits before someone else did. When we catch him, we'll just annotate his obfuscated copy with a link to the original metadata, so payment flows are restored. This ought to even work retroactively. It's no more complex than what we're doing, with these third party content platforms trying to put handcuffs on our devices all the time. It's just a different model which we're not exploring because the existing model is in the way.