Musicians for the past couple of decades, have seen a huge decline in their net revenue from album sales, the most basic reason for the same have been the high constituting margins of record companies and production houses.
This disrupted the state of musicians throughout the world, leaving them with striking low income for their talent.
While there have been numerable amounts of attempts to lower the existence of such middlemen none have achieved a margin higher than 20 percent to the musicians.
In 1999, Napster a company launched with the aim to create an environment to directly connect the fans with the musicians by use of a real time peer-to-peer file sharing system had given the world the first blood. Napster was later shut down due to alleged copyright infringements as well as a bankruptcy order of the courts.
Today, blockchain environment accomplishing newer heights has made it possible to again create an immutable environment to direct connect the musicians to their fans.
The biggest consideration while creation of such an environment is management of all the Intellectual Properties(IP) which was the only area where Napster lagged being as well the reason for its downfall.
In the current era blockchain being the supreme ruler of immutable database, can certainly avoid infringement of rights by creation of a public blockchain acting as a registry for every IP.
This can as well be a concrete evidence to the right and ownership. This will ensure that the Peer-to-peer model is free from unauthorized use of the network by not letting a node to add files to the database without ownership to the requisite IP.
Keeping the above basic mechanism in mind MYCELIA and UJOMUSIC are some amongst the startups who can successfully found a decentralized IP maintaining mechanism for the musicians.
They use smart contracts to solve licensing issues and catalog songs with their respective creators. They have added an additional “promote” feature where the fans can promote their respective artists by paying them.
Blockchain technology on the whole is emerging as viable new way for many industries to dis-intermediate and add transparency without losing on security.
The same is for the whole entertainment industry.
Moving away from the entertainment industry, which I chose for the purposes of simplicity, imagine for a minute freelance journalists, ethical hackers, coders, designers, each with their own I.P.
Move on to whole organizations conducting billion dollar I.P. deals, in sectors like asset-management, software, and A.I.
When IP rights holders register their works to a blockchain, the rights holders can ultimately end up with concrete evidence of ownership, which is free from tampering, because once a work has been registered to a blockchain, that information cannot ever be lost or changed.
Do you get the chills a bit?
Can you think of a world where I.P fraud is eliminated with one public blockchain governing millions of dollars in protected rights?
To elaborate my point further, here’s excerpts from IPWatchdog’s interview with with Aaron Swerdlow and Banu Naraghi, to discuss why digital currency offers a new way to scrutinize IP.
According to Naraghi -
Blockchain specifically is critical to the securitization of IP because it guarantees the validity of a transaction by recording the transaction on a main centralized register as well as a connected publicly distributed system of registers.
If you deeply understand the basic premise of blockchain, the very fact that private data, contained on a publically accessible database, confirmed and updated every transaction, is the peak of data transparency and fraud-prevention.
Naraghi continues -
One of the most common applications of blockchain technology is the use of it as a registry of IP rights, to catalogue and store original works.
Blockchain Beyond Fintech
Blockchain’s use-cases are seemingly on the rise, with the technology increasingly gaining traction beyond its fintech use.
Companies like VeChain and Ambrosus offer their own blockchains, and track the supply model of food and medical products, to prevent counterfeit goods from being circulated in credible stores.
In short, blockchain can be applied to to many, many I.P. sensitive areas, such as pharma, luxury, automobile, and basic customer goods.
Diving into the technical points —
- I.P includes all kinds of legal applications, inclusive of government regulations, financial laws, and data privacy.
- I.P. transfer still remains a paper-heavy industry, marked with slow administration and poor I.P. protection.
- I.P. on the blockchain includes — and is not limited to — evidence of ownership, authentication, of rights to be sold. Tracking and controlling the sold rights until the two parties are rightfully incentivized. And finally, establishing and enforcing IP agreements.
This includes when a trademark was first applied for, registered, first used in trade; when a design, trademark or patent was licensed, assigned, and so on.
LEXIT is an Estonian-based, blockchain centered firm that focuses on selling I.P, and even whole companies, via the use of their system.
By providing users with the tools to easily track the entire life cycle of a patent, a right, or an I.P, Lexit makes the paper-heavy, time-consuming process look like a definite breeze.
Check out the project for yourself ?
Site — https://www.lexit.co
Twitter — https://twitter.com/LEXITco