Rewarding "Original" Content Creators in a Mashup / Remix Culture
It's not far-fetched to say that 90% of creative works these days are mashups from different contents made by others. If you trace back far enough, pretty much every creative works are remixed from parts of something else in the past. Pretty much like the big bang. A point source to the wondrous universe that we live in today. If we are all humans trapped in the confines of rooms devoid of information, it's fair to say that creative work (and the world at large) would not have progressed at all.
The hard problem is to recognize and attribute original contents. Lyrics are easy - but what about half-lyrics? If you have ever dug deep enough into music - you'll find that the most extreme case for a lawsuit hell to be in the realm of plunderphonics. Plunderphonics are essentially pure mashups of different samples of tracks and instrumentals. Now with apps and whatnot, there are thousands of mashups that come into existence, every single day. There is even this music genre called Vaporwave. Disposable music, each track made in less than a few hours (don't get me wrong, I love this genre).
And this is just music, what about others like image manipulation, writing, etc?
Is it possible to reward the creators for every recognizable manifestations of related content? Definitely a big headache if we are to develop a fully-automated system for this. Automated because there are so many contents out there! And most of us don't even care to tag our contents in full detail. Attribution is difficult.
To simplify this problem, let's assume the following:-
> We attempt to solve the issue of attribution only when item has more than X views or Y profits.
> Contents must be digital, no way around it.
> One-time manual attribution is required. Just an acknowledgement that an item is not sufficiently original.
> We can only try to minimize legal friction, not entirely eliminate chances of willful prosecution.
With the points above in mind, perhaps we can create crypto-reserves. One generated wallet, created and reserved for "someone else" for each content. This could create some sort of widely accepted standard practice. Potential claimants know there's something for them, and as such could be resolved by oracles. The value structure in such a reserve system, however, is out of my league at the moment. Just putting this thought out there!
Regards, Kevin Wong ([email protected])
It's simple when you discard the whole concept of so-called intellectual property.
If I own my body and tools, then I can use them however I please. You can own storage devices and other such physical objects but you can't own information. As a musician and screenwriter, I understand that I charge for the service of production, performance, and distribution. I 'm not selling property, I'm providing services. As such, I don't concern myself with IP protection whatsoever.
Point well made! I've had plenty of music (that I never charged for, but highly mashed up) taken off Soundcloud and Youtube. It's just a difficult proposition when dealing with the world at large, discarding the whole concept of IP. Perhaps I'm not in touch with such legal issues, are there any growing movements around this?
It'll be interesting to see what sort of collaborative platforms spawn from the Blockchain revolution for musicians and other artists working in digital content...
I.e. Cloud-based shared project files, with user-granted access - that track each user's contribution and would automatically split revenue shares - digital rights and accounting all integrated into the blockchain licenses...
Being a music producer, I could see that as a pretty bad-ass system, if developed properly - being able to share a digital studio with artists all over the world, the technical side of collaborative productions totally streamlined.
Maybe something like SoundCloud / Youtube with built-in music production tools and interface, or some API of some sort to connect with Ableton, Reason, etc.. so it could track pieces that music producers use.
Links to your stuff? I'm into music as well, let's keep in touch :)