Is blockchain technology reversing what Internet has acheived?

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• Jasper Eindhoven, the NetherlandsMember Posts: 514 ✭✭✭

  May 2014

  Mildly frustrating article in that it takes forever to actually get to what they did.. To be honest, i expect it is essentially timestamping, like Chronos, with some fancy centralized people telling you whether it is derivative of something. It that is what it is, it really needs to pump itself up to look like something... Afaict it doesnt stop copying.
  
  Note that many things 'free' on the web come at the cost of privacy, and manipulation. Monetizing in better ways is a very acceptable topic, authors need to eat and stuff, and we can probably do it better, with fewer middlemen.
  
  Imo the holy grail of it is a system where things are determined to be derivative of each other automatically, on a generalized basis, and advertising/donations are automatically send down the derivatives chain. I expect that context dependent approaches work better though.
  
  Systems where people just form author groups are easier though, but then they have to associate. That has a cost where people are left/in out and there is a process to that.
  
  I heard about approaches where people can form writing groups, or where it works on loyality between software developers, essentially. People would find the packages from a NameReg that also reinforces it. But i'd worry about the user-facing ones having too much power.
  
  Because of the trivial copying thing, they all really require loyalty from the end user. Or, the user not acting stupid, like allowing monetization by people that didnt actually contribute..

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• StephanTual London, EnglandMember, Moderator Posts: 1,282 mod

  May 2014

  What Jasper said... monegraph is just trustred timestamping, with a central authority to boot. https://www.btproof.com/ did it before.
  
  Much more interesting would be to lock the access to the art using public/private keys and then exchange said art on a decentralized market. You now have a system where the artists are in control and get directly rewarded for their efforts.

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• cuddaloreappu Member Posts: 20 ✭

  May 2014

  
  I think this topic will be seen from different viewpoint, there are lot of people who disagree with copyrights(Piratebay) and there are people who favor copyrights and patents.
  
  @jasper so what are you finally suggesting..blockchain will favour the Napster types or it will bring traditional copyright to internet...

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• Jasper Eindhoven, the NetherlandsMember Posts: 514 ✭✭✭

  May 2014

  Having more power over the thing gives you more power to try to make money from it, that doesnt really change. However, goodwill from users/readers/viewers also matters, and if you can have neat monetization schemes that dont care so much about copying, not-using-them potentialy uses some of that goodwill.
  
  Of course plagiarism is a different deal. I putting your own name on it and just taking advertising and donation money from works that arent your own.

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• sdpalley Member Posts: 15 ✭

  May 2014

  There's an interesting historical parallel. On the one hand, the printing-press had a lot to do with the development of the modern novel and newspapers. On the other hand, writers felt like they were getting killed by printers who would take someone else's work, reproduce it, and not pay a penny to the creator. The Statute of Anne (circa 1710) was the first Copyright law and introduced (in part) to deal with this market imbalance. If there's nothing worthwhile to reproduce, a printing press is just a bunch of ink-stained metal. No Statute of Anne, no Jonathan Swift?
  
  For a little more on the Statute of Anne, see
  
  http://www.copyrighthistory.com/anne.html
  
  It may be that we move past a point in time or technology where we can protect against or limit re-productibility. Maybe the law changes along the way. But value can still be ascribed to certain creators or content streams. And this is where reputation is an important marker of value -- fungible, maybe, but only in the form of someone vouching for you (like a credit-default swap, though that may be an unfortunate analogy).

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• Jasper Eindhoven, the NetherlandsMember Posts: 514 ✭✭✭

  May 2014

  Of course just focussing 'Anne' bit of history misrepresents copyright history. It says at the end "for the term of fourteen", that is 14 years. As opposed to life+80years, or rather, constantly updated to keep Mickey Mouse copyrighted. Nor does it represent well who is holding copyrights currently.
  
  Largely the sentiment is that we should not limit re-producibility. Trying to limit reproducibility with stuff like DRM is the same as telling me what to do with my computer, and the NSA has clearly shown us that they would overreach in that too.
  
  Also, the method i called 'perhaps a holy grail' above doesnt really require any such limitation. The platform streams back monetization automatically and detects plagiarism. The only limitation would be is to for the data to be used outside the platform context, or worse in a platform that channels the monetization the wrong way.(which would be rather stupid if that were a well known fact, but lots of people are stupid) Though we may not get our holy grail, generally, platforms and getting people to platforms is what can monetize things. Having the platforms pay to the authors is just as important as getting people to pay.

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