From Web 2.0 to Web 2016: The Need for Public Platforms for Digital Ownership

https://blockai.com/blog/from-web-2.0-to-web-2016/

by williamcotton • 10 years ago

46 21 10 years ago

jhoechtl3• 10 years ago

To sum it up: Web 2.0 was about democracy, Web2016 is about monopolized capitalism

Web 2016 is the return of capitalism to the productive capacities of the Web. The version that we're returning to is the late 20th century capitalism that is most definitely marked by giant media conglomerates with monopolistic tendencies.

Bitcoin is an interesting technology to work with because it is also about capitalism, but with a return to more outdated notions individual-centric as opposed to corporate-centric exchanges of value.

This makes Bitcoin and other blockchains the perfect engines to build digital property systems that can support marketplaces for intellectual property, modeled not on the late 20th century notions of copyright, rather the way the systems worked in the 18th and 19th centuries.

jhoechtl3• 10 years ago

The future of the Web is a WebAssembly powered blockchain in the browser.

fweespee_ch3• 10 years ago

Slightly off topic but its a question related to BlockAI...

Does anyone know if this is actual proof that has been accepted in a legal court in any country in regards to a copyright dispute?

https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2006/08/25/the-myth-of-poor-...

Then, in the courtroom, things don't get any better. First off, the court room will not be a federal one, but a state one. Since you didn't register your work, you can not sue in federal court and, thus, will only be eligible to receive either the amount the infringement made or the amount you lost, whichever is greater. Sadly, in many, if not most, copyright matters that amount is equal to exactly zero.

http://www3.ce9.uscourts.gov/jury-instructions/node/262

A copyright registration certificate can shift the burden of coming forward with proof of plaintiff’s ownership of a valid copyright. The certificate constitutes prima facie evidence of the validity of the copyright and facts stated in the certificate. Lamps Plus, Inc. v. Seattle Lighting Fixture Co., 345 F.3d 1140, 1144–45 (9th Cir.2003). The judge may consider instructing the jury using Instruction 17.5 where: 1) the plaintiff submits no certificate of registration, or 2) the plaintiff produces a registration made five years after the date of the first publication, or 3) the plaintiff submits a registration made within five years of first publication and the defendant submits evidence to dispute the plaintiff’s ownership of a valid copyright.
A person who holds a copyright may obtain a certificate of registration from the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress. This certificate is sufficient to establish the facts stated in the certificate, unless outweighed by other evidence in this case.

That seems to imply its still the strongest evidence.

williamcotton8• 10 years ago

Yup, you're correct that an official registration with the Copyright Office is required to successfully sue for infringement but what changed with the Copyright Act of 1976 is that registration can happen after the fact, even if you've been denied, in which case you'll definitely need some evidence of ownership or some other proof of publication.

Until there is more statutory law or common law precedent set around even the fundamental notion of using digital signatures to as a proof of authorship all of this is really sort of up in the air but we're trying our best to work within the existing legal structures in the jurisdictions where we're doing business

The bigger picture with Open Publish is to create a software platform for digital ownership that allows for say, a Patreon-like application to seamlessly integrate with a Spotify-like application, if that makes any sense!

Our first attempt at a product built with Open Publish is just a simple proof of publication service that people can use along with existing legal notions of copyright with the hope that we can start registering content before we worry about solving the problems of a two-sided marketplace!

fweespee_ch3• 10 years ago

Good luck and thank you for being honest. :)

Yeah, I'm aware of the 5 year window.

troymc2• 10 years ago

Your comment only applies to US citizens, who make up about 3/70 of the world population. What about the vast majority of the world?

There was a time when DNA and faxes weren't considered admissible. It just takes time for legal systems to catch up with new technologies.

williamcotton8• 10 years ago

Considering that Blockai's offices are located in the United States, I think it was a pretty good question!

You're correct that the bigger picture is a solution that, like the Internet itself, crosses international borders, which is why we chose to build on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. Blockchain technology has the ability to work seamlessly within existing legal systems. At Blockai we're having to explore the nuances of a good deal of those existing legal systems and we're starting with our own home turf. It's a good time to be an IP lawyer, that's for sure!

fweespee_ch3• 10 years ago

Does anyone know if this is actual proof that has been accepted in a legal court in any country in regards to a copyright dispute?

You didn't read my comment? I did ask about other countries.

I only used one example [the US] since it is the one I'm familiar with.

mtberatwork• 10 years ago

Not really understanding how some of these rows relate. For example: content management systems > wikis > fiverr. What's the correlation here? Outside of perhaps social media posts, anyone creating content online is still using some variant of a CMS.

williamcotton8• 10 years ago

It is a very loose association and I tried my best to continue the same kind of very loose association that Tim O'Reilly used with his definitions of Web 2.0. What did Tim even mean with his "CMS > wiki" trajectory?

What I think he was trying to say was that people will collectively organize information around a wiki without payment where a CMS has a notion of a top-down hierarchy with people organizing information for a salary.

With Fiverr I was trying to extend this notion to a marketplace where you can pay people to organize information.

I think the "Akamai > BitTorrent > Netflix" is the easiest to describe, at least in terms of overall network bandwidth. A decade ago BitTorrent was taking up a massive amount of overall bandwidth. These days Netflix is responsible for the majority of bandwidth usage and BitTorrent use continues to decline in relative comparison.

acabal2• 10 years ago

From my reading it sounds like this blockchain-based proof-of-copyright is a solution looking for a problem.

IANAL, but from what I understand damages for copyright infringement are high. Today if an individual has their copyright infringed by a corporation, and that infringement is big enough to get a significant award, I think a plausible outcome is a lawyer helps them on contingency and arrives at some reasonable settlement. I don't think it's super hard to prove you created something around the time you say you did, and even if that fact is murky, corporations usually know what they did and didn't create and nobody wants a drawn-out legal battle; so a settlement is not an unlikely outcome.

In the reverse case, as we all know corporations are not shy about suing individuals for infringing on copyright. In that case the corporation, with its huge legal power and ostensibly better documentation, typically extracts whatever they wish from the infringer (anyone remember the ruinous "settlements" for the RIAA file sharing lawsuits of the early 2000's?). If the corporation for some reason can't win, then it can consider the loss a cost of doing business.

In cases where the infringer is unreachable (anonymous website hosted in Sealand), proof of ownership wouldn't be helpful anyway.

What we need isn't some kind of super fancy digital copyright registry, what we need is copyright reform to bring balance back to the public good, away from megacorporations and the rent-seeking grandchildren of the grandchildren of the original creators; and a push back to requiring registration of copyright to be granted protection.

williamcotton8• 10 years ago

what we need is copyright reform to bring balance back to the public good, away from megacorporations and the rent-seeking grandchildren of the grandchildren of the original creators;

I agree 100%! In the meantime, we can start in the private sector by building tools to assist the legal profession long before statutory law can catch up with current technologies.

From my reading it sounds like this blockchain-based proof-of-copyright is a solution looking for a problem.

We've been working with these concepts for almost two years and to be honest we did spend a lot of time staring a solution looking for a problem. We've had a gut feeling that we were on to something and luckily in the last six months or so we've found a number of customers, both in the legal services industry and in individual authors, that have helped guide us towards the service that we're now offering at https://blockai.com

We already have paying customers!

and a push back to requiring registration of copyright to be granted protection

I disagree. People need to be able to find the copyright owners in a central registry so we don't end up with the problems surrounding orphan works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works

In cases where the infringer is unreachable (anonymous website hosted in Sealand), proof of ownership wouldn't be helpful anyway.

This is really an article into itself, but Open Publish really wants to explore the idea of "code as law". If you use honorable software that enforces notions of intellectual property for users, then all users who use honorable software will be enforcing any notions of intellectual property.

I'll give a really rough example using music. People can choose to use Spotify, which is honorable software, in that it honors existing IP contracts, or they can choose to use dishonorable software like The Pirate Bay, which chooses not to honor existing IP contracts.

BitTorrent itself is just a distribution technology and it is completely agnostic to the concept of ownership. Open Publish is just decentralized accounting software that is completely agnostic to the concept of distribution. Both are completely agnostic to the existing legal systems in which they operate. BitTorrent can be used legally by Blizzard to push out updates or it can be used illegally by The Pirate Bay to infringe on copyrights.

As long as we can make easy to use software that is legally valid, we expect people will choose to use the honorable software. In any case, legal pressure causes illegal sites to do things that harm customer experiences. At some point people seem to decide to subscribe to services like Netflix instead of trying to figure out why Popcorn Time stopped working.

The Pirate Bay could build a system using Open Publish that also honored the existing IP contracts and directed payments to the rights-holders while continuing to use BitTorrent for distribution, but only if all of those rights-holders had already registered their works with Open Publish, which is one of many reasons why Blockai is currently focused on the registration process.

By using Bitcoin or other blockchains we can take advantage of its decentralized consensus properties and can build honorable software that is open, transparent and equal-access. Spotify might be honorable software but it is most definitely closed, opaque and has very uneven relationships across individuals and corporations. We think we can all figure out a much better solution.

acabal2• 10 years ago

I don't think "honorable software" is a great idea. Laws and social mores change all the time, but software could be forever.

What if, in the 70s, the first creators of Unix tried to make it "honorable" by baking in DRM restrictions? DRM restrictions "enforce the notion of intellectual property for all users", but I and many others consider it terminally abhorrent to the concept of user freedom and general computing. Imagine a world where you could only grep a file on your system if the file's intellectual "owners" allowed your system to do so. Such a world would have never seen the open source computing revolution we're living in now.

Gay marriage was illegal until just recently. Would "honorable" wedding planning software compiled in the year 2001 explicitly reject gay couples, not because of the developer's personal preferences, but because their union was against the law at the time? By my reading of your definition, then yes, that's what "honorable" software would have done--enforce the day's law on the user on the justice system's behalf.

I'd go even so far as to say that "code as law" is an extremely dangerous concept that conflates the uncaring lockstep precision of a mathematical system with the messy, changing, and imprecise reality of human law and justice. Humans must enforce their own laws, not machines, and thank God we have judges and juries, not algorithms.

No, "honorable" software is not a useful target. Better to make general-purpose software, agnostic of today's laws and mores, in the spirit of empowering users to use that software as a tool in whatever way they deem useful--not in whatever way you thought was "honorable" at the specific time of compilation. The software I use is my tool, not my overlord.

trentmc• 10 years ago

Here's a whitepaper from early 2015 that explores the challenges faced by digital artists and creators of the Internet, and points to a solution that is a combination of legals and technology.

https://www.ascribe.io/app/editions/1iYjGaiKPSm3uw3bqZoTWBEk...

Abstract: One long-standing drawback to the Internet is the hidden ‘artist penalty.’ The very strengths of the Internet make it difficult for creators of digital content to be fairly compensated for their work. This paper describes our implementation and proposes a fix that makes it easy to control one’s intellectual property by constituting a new “ownership layer” on top of the existing Internet. The approach has two pieces: a registry with easy, secure legals; and visibility into usage / provenance of the content. The legals formalize existing copyright rights of digital objects, making them easy and fluid for a creator or collector to use, transfer or modify. The bitcoin blockchain is used to securely record ownership transactions that are impossible to later repudiate or manipulate. Internet-scale media search provides visibility into usage of the media by crawling the web, applying machine learning to identify similar or identical media, and subsequently reporting their existence and location to the registered owners. Taken together, these pieces constitute “ownership processing” – a simple tractable solution to make ownership actions of digital property universally accessible.

From Web 2.0 to Web 2016: The Need for Public Platforms for Digital Ownership

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