
From Web 2.0 to Web 2016: The Need for Public Platforms for Digital Ownership - williamcotton
https://blockai.com/blog/from-web-2.0-to-web-2016/
======
trentmc
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...](https://www.ascribe.io/app/editions/1iYjGaiKPSm3uw3bqZoTWBEkJQCaPHM4L)

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.

------
acabal
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.

~~~
williamcotton
> 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](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](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.

~~~
acabal
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.

~~~
williamcotton
_> 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._

The kind of baked-in enforcement DRM that you're talking about is very
different than the honorable notions I'm talking about.

Royalties were also called honorariums for a reason. The publisher who is
sharing profits with the author is honoring their intellectual labors.

The idea is not to restrict information flow but to promote equitable
financial activities. This is already how platforms like Spotify work but the
mechanics are opaque and dysfunctional, if not only because they're built on
mechanical notions from the 20th century.

That means, if I make something, register it, and then I sell 20% of my
ownership to someone else, if the software that you write looks up who the
owners are in the registry and then pays out directly to the listed owners,
then your software is honoring the contract agreeing to the exchange of
ownership in intellectual property.

I'm not at all talking about a situation where software will stop people from
acting in certain ways, rather just talking about ways in which software can
facilitate our existing systems of intellectual property through the public
sharing of information about assets and their transactions between private
owners.

 _> 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._

"Code as law" is how Spotify, YouTube, or Facebook already work. They are
software applications that adhere to the law and already engage in legal
profit making and trade. I'm not suggesting that code should ever be used in
place of the existing legal systems! I'm just talking about public accounting
software running on a decentralized consensus engine! You're reading way too
much in to what I'm saying here. Straw-men abound.

 _> 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_

I agree 100%! But there is room for software to interface with the legal
process. It's called a separation of concerns. I wouldn't want BitTorrent to
have any concept of digital ownership. That doesn't mean we can't build
modular code that does have a notion of digital ownership while also adhering
to the BitTorrent protocol.

If you'd like to email me at my HN username at gmail, I'd be happy to have a
phone or a FaceTime conversation so we can both better explain our positions.
I'm not exactly sure what your response has to do with what we're working on
but I'm sure we could figure it out pretty easily with a friendly
conversation!

 _> This is really an article into itself_

It's understandable that you misinterpreted me because I didn't define the
terms nor the context for "honorable" and "enforce". If I had instead chosen
to write an article I would have positioned these against the kind of "rootkit
DRM" notions from the Slashdot era that you're assuming I'm in support of.

I'm working on another article that explains these concepts with more clarity.
:)

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

~~~
williamcotton
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.

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

~~~
williamcotton
I definitely agree that there is a lot of potential to unite the publishing
capacities of the World Wide Web with the financial capacities of blockchains!

You should check out the open source projects that are referenced in the
article:

[https://github.com/blockai/openpublish](https://github.com/blockai/openpublish)

[https://github.com/blockai/openpublish-state-
engine](https://github.com/blockai/openpublish-state-engine)

The Open Publish protocol basically embeds a WebTorrent compatible BitTorrent
Info Hash in to the Bitcoin blockchain.

~~~
jhoechtl
Blockchain != Bitcoin. In fact I would not like to live in a world like
[https://blockchainfutureslab.wordpress.com/2016/02/27/a-typi...](https://blockchainfutureslab.wordpress.com/2016/02/27/a-typical-
day-in-a-blockchain-enabled-world/) . But I like the democratic aspect of the
Blockchain as seen by some of the DAPs of Ethereum
[http://dapps.ethercasts.com/](http://dapps.ethercasts.com/). If you think of
Blockchain equals only financial capacities, please move along.

------
fweespee_ch
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-...](https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2006/08/25/the-myth-of-poor-mans-
copyright/)

> 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](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.

~~~
troymc
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.

~~~
williamcotton
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!

~~~
troymc
If you get big enough, you'll find that Bitcoin's blockchain a terrible
blockchain for what you're doing. It's throughput is on the order of 1
transaction per second, you can't store much data per transaction, the latency
is on the order of an hour (before you can be sure your transaction is "in"),
and the fees per transaction are on the order of tens of US cents (unless you
want to wait even longer).

There are other problems, but I'm sure you read the news.

~~~
williamcotton
Considering that registering with the Copyright Office takes 8-10 month I
think that waiting a few hours for a transaction to end up in a block during
peak times is a big improvement!

Open Publish doesn't need to be on any specific blockchain. We started with
the most popular and most secure. All that Open Publish needs is a
decentralized consensus public-access datastore based on public key
cryptography.

We could also very easily batch registrations and transfers in to just a few
Bitcoin transactions an hour. Since we're using our own Bitcoin you can be
pretty sure that as our costs begin to climb upwards that we'll look in to
making things cheaper!

We have been actively building software on top of the Bitcoin blockchain for
over two years. We're very familiar with both the protocol and the
intermittent weather on the network. The pros and cons are well known to us
but that doesn't mean your concerns are not valid!

You are free to try it out for yourself:
[https://github.com/blockai/openpublish](https://github.com/blockai/openpublish)

------
mtberatwork
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.

~~~
williamcotton
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.

