Category Blockchain
2017 Conference
I’m pleased to welcome the law firm of Davis Wright & Tremaine (DWT) as a Gold Sponsor for the Copyright and Technology 2017 conference. DWT partner Lance Koonce is one of the leaders of the firm’s Blockchain Initiative and has been especially active in blockchain applications for media and the arts. (In fact, I first met […]
Blockchain Hype vs. Skepticism: A Poll
At last week’s Public Meeting on Developing the Digital Marketplace for Copyrighted Works at the Patent and Trademark Office in Washington, it appeared that my article from the previous week expressing skepticism about some of the hype around media applications for blockchain technology had, as more than one person put it, “made the rounds.” As a result, […]
Conference on Digital Marketplace for Copyrighted Works at PTO
The U.S. Commerce Department’s Internet Policy Task Force will be holding a conference on Friday December 9, Public Meeting on Developing the Digital Marketplace for Copyrighted Works. The event will take place at the Madison Auditorium, Patent and Trademark Office, Alexandria, VA. The objective of this event will be to see what role government can play in areas […]
Of Hammers, Nails, and Blockchains
The phrase “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” originated with Abraham Kaplan in his seminal 1964 work on behavioral science. He applied it — as many parents have done ever since — to young kids. These days, blockchain technology is a hammer. An excellent illustration of how this applies […]
Core Rights and SOCAN Building Blockchain-Based System for Venue Music Licensing
Amid all the talk, hype, and activity around blockchain solutions for music, questions arise about whether large existing entities in the digital music value chain will adopt the technology, and if so, how. These fall roughly into four buckets: record labels, music publishers, royalty collecting societies, and DSPs (consumer music distributors such as Apple, Spotify, and Pandora). One […]
Guest Post: Blockchains Won’t Change the Music Industry. Only Artists Can.
It seems that every day there is a new article or new platform claiming the blockchain will revolutionize the music industry. There are at least 20 companies developing ways to write write music metadata into the blockchain. The Open Music Initiative has brought together over 120 companies trying to find new solutions to the current […]
Music Rights Reporting, DDEX, and Blockchains
Last time, I discussed the need to automate and standardize rights and royalty transaction processing in today’s music market. At the heart of that market is streaming plays on on-demand services. As the latest RIAA revenue figures have shown, on-demand streaming is now the second-largest source of recorded music industry revenue and should overtake downloads […]
Blockchain Solutions for Music Rights Processing
One aspect of the recent hype about blockchain applications for music is the spate of conferences and panels about it. I went to one of these last Wednesday: the Music 4.5 conference at the offices of the ReedSmith law firm in NYC. The event was cleverly organized: the first half was devoted to startups who touted the virtues […]
Watermarking and Blockchain Challenges
Last time I talked about blockchain technology and its potential to revolutionize certain types of copyright-related transactions. Now let’s talk about some challenges. Even though the potential for blockchain applications in the copyright arena is high, it’s inevitable that many of the schemes being proposed will not pan out; that’s the nature of technology hype. […]
Get Ready for the Blockchain Tsunami
Lately I’ve been hearing about blockchain-related solutions to copyright problems on practically a weekly basis. Perhaps this was inevitable, given the massive amounts of activity and hype surrounding blockchain technology, and the realization that it has applications well beyond cryptocurrency (and I’m sure others have been observing this same phenomenon in different industries at different times). But […]
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