I keep thinking how great it would be if digital goods like music, movies, ebooks, video games, or even event tickets could be stored and transported as easily as a cryptocurrency. Currently most digital goods’ wealth is locked behind centralized systems like iTunes, Amazon, or Steam, but what if these goods could be moved and transported with keeping the DRM intact? It would unlock a vast amount of wealth for users. Right now I bet there is someone with iTunes account that is worth $50,000. This is dead value to the world. There is no way for this value to ever be unlocked. Imagine if people could sell their digital goods or use it for collateral?
I see a lot of use cases for having digital goods stored in blockchain technology. It can introduce rarity to digital goods. Content producers can create limited edition/collector digital goods that cannot be duplicated or counterfeited. Users may get early edition or first edition digital goods timestamped and numbered on the blockchain. Let’s say a user buys a song from an unknown artist, this artist then gains fame. This user now holds a very early edition song which cannot be counterfeited. It would be very rare and might hold value to some. Some other use cases:
Content producers could have full control of publishing. They can license or sell their content at any price point while knowing exactly how many items were sold or how often it was used. Micropayment for streaming a single piece content would be possible.
Users can unlock value of their digital goods. Users might be able to pool their digital goods to compete with streaming services and receive dividends from their digital goods (not sure of the license rules here).
How can this be done technically? I would guess that the token would have a key to the encrypted content stored off blockchain. These tokens would not have much value, so what is the reward to the miners? Unlike other cryptocurrency tokens I’m unsure if these tokens should be divisible. If they are not the reward blocks would have to increase over time to scale with the amount of digital goods stored in them. Perhaps the solution for this type of network not creating it’s own blockchain. Any ideas?
It can introduce rarity to digital goods. Content producers can create limited edition/collector digital goods that cannot be duplicated or counterfeited. Users may get early edition or first edition digital goods timestamped and numbered on the blockchain.
I used to think like that as well, but then someone pointed out to me that the first person who proves the existence of some digital good is not necessarily the author.
An even worse problem (or advantage, if you’re not what’s today commonly referred to as “the copyright holder”) is that any asset can be slightly modified to produce a different checksum and become one of many “originals” available to anyone.
And finally you can have a variety of blockchains. So it’s going to be difficult for some authors and copyright holders.
Disintermediation is certain to occur, I think, and some authors could do better, but we’ll see. Many will be worse off because copying will be rampant and stealthy.
How can this be done? Look at Storj.io. I haven’t considered this question yet because I first want to see Storj.io come out, but they could add things like “paid channels” and things that you mention. Maybe you wouldn’t necessarily download content - maybe you’d just stream and play it on your client. Or have a Smart Contract that would charge you more for the first playback and less for the next 5, etc. (I’m talking about Ethereum Smart Contracts on Counterparty).
Rewards will be sent to those who store and send (stream) data that you consume. In theory it’d be nice if there were rewards for authors/copyright holders, but I don’t see it happening soon… A built in tipping widget - maybe.
> I used to think like that as well, but then someone pointed out to me that the first person who proves the existence of some digital good is not necessarily the author.
I think this would be the case early in the system, but eventually original content producers could be authenticated with some identification system perhaps from there social media platforms. Once these goods are produced and signed digitally from their distribution channel they could not be counterfeited. These digital goods would be just as hard to counterfeit as any other cryptocurrency. Obviously the content could be copied but hopefully they would be as easy to spot as a bootleg DVD with a badly printed photocopy. Bad actors could make the official channels confusing just like YouTube channels, but collectors would know the difference. Perhaps because of the encryption of stored content and tradability of them cost dramatically lower costs whilst allowing more profit for content producers.
I guess there would have to be some centralized authority on the distribution to oversee blatant copyright infringements.
I was thinking Storj too. I would love the see the capability of storing and transporting these digital goods. In the case of event tickets it would be really nice to know there was a 0% counterfeit chance and be able to sell them without centralized systems. Having some sort of blockchain to verify time/date would be necessary for collector edition of digital goods. Do you know this could be created on top of Counterparty as a DAPP?
Anything is possible since the Ethereum Serpent language is a Turing-complete system that can describe anything.
It’s currently available on Counterparty testnet and if you search this forum for “Ethereum” you will find a few posts about it.
I remain skeptical that any sort of control will be possible. People who download and repost original content shortened by 1 second cannot be detected by fingerprinting, and who would run such detection tests and why? Creators will have to find best ways to get voluntary subscriptions, donations and tips, it seems to me.
Piracy and copying is a clearly a technically insurmountable issue, since ownership and copyright are entirely psychological concepts (intellectual property). There’s millions of dollars being poured into stopping it, but ironically the only things that work to pace it whatsoever are services like Netflix. If the assets are tied to logins for continuously changing data, that may have a few use cases. But I’m sure some people still take the time to make webrips from Netflix, etc.
I like the idea to use it to replace physical tickets trustlessly, or to serve as limited login tokens (which at least restricts it to one user at a time, somewhat.) For example the SWARM “GOLDENTICKET”, which gives you access to actual events. Or the LTBCOIN “EARLY” access token, you can read more about that here in (token controlled access): http://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/tcv