How to solve the Piracy vs Digital Restrictions Management problem

A quick look into the LBRY project, and whether it is a good investment opportunity. I have no referral link, and have not invested in it yet. I gave myself one hour to check out the project and think aloud on Steem to the benefit of us all. Here goes...

Someone spammed Steem with LBRY referral links, which made me think it is a shitcoin. It turns out that's not the case at all. I will start by checking out the project website. Then I will look at the team, the community, the software and last but not least the whitepaper if they have one. I will not look at the markets this time.

Project Website

The website looks appealing and professional. There are essential links to information as well as social media. You can also subscribe to email updates. There is also a twitter feed. Here's a screenshot of it:

The Team

First of all, there are people who seem to be real with their faces and real names. There are no links to personal profiles, but lots of references and links to relevant experience. There is also a guy from the time when the world was black and white, and all real men had huge beards. The team looks really professional and capable of delivering.

##The community

There's a subreddit and a slack channel for the community. The reddit side isn't very active, with a few posts and comments per day. I joined the slack to see if they are engaged there. There's over a thousand registered users and at the moment 44 of them are online. I joined the channel and observed maybe a hundred or so comments from today, of which most where random stuff. I said hello, and immediately someone responded and gave some hints on who to ask for more information. Very nice! He said the conversation usually gets very active on new releases.

The software

The software is open source. I'm not sure about the license, but they state: "LBRY is 100% open source in the Bazaar tradition.". On github I find a custom license, and yes, all the software seems to be there.

The software cannot be downloaded from the site yet, but you can wait for an invitation. I signed up for one, and will post my experience here later. However I got a referral link :-D. Feel free to click: https://lbry.io/get?r=KOuw7

The concept

Youtube video:

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I found no white paper, but an essay https://lbry.io/what . It looks like they have something that's really thought out. My 15 minutes left will not be enough to get a deep understanding about the project, but I got a feeling that it might work. It might be the solution to the problem of which one side is piracy and the other is DRM and middle men.

1. There is the blockchain and protocol, which provides the currency, key:value database, decentralised dns, distributed storage system. All variants of the innovations I know from IPFS, ethereum etc.
2. Here is what seems to be the core innovation of LBRY:

>It’s possible this system sounds like chaos to you, but we’re betting on a Nobel-prize winning result that predicts the opposite. Economist Ronald Coase theorized that in a system with low transaction cost and clear rules, property will be held by those who value it the most. Since LBRY names are the equivalent to content storefronts, we believe that LBRY names will hold the most value to rightsholders who produce content associated with a given name.

>As names in demand on LBRY will be more expensive, the names themselves will also serve as a signal of reputation, legitimacy, and quality. If a user searches LBRY for Spider Man and sees one at lbry://spiderman and one at lbry://spiderman_russhaxor, there will be little doubt that the latter is less legitimate.

>It is also worth noting that in the event that LBRY received notice that either name contained an illegitimate copy of Spider Man, LBRY would dutifully and quickly put that content id on a blacklist, blocking discovery or purchase via any legal services. LBRY and users of LBRY are still subject to the DMCA and other relevant laws of their respective countries.

I think this is sound economics, and it will be very interesting to see it in action. Most people I know of have no problem with paying respectful owners for their content, quite the opposite.

Conclusion

This was very short, but I'm going to dig deeper into this LBRY. It looks like one of the best and most promising projects out there. I hope there isn't a buying rush before I have the time to buy. Actually, I'm not even sure if there is a market for LBRY...

Thanks for reading!