How Po.et Uses Blockchain Technology to Revolutionize Digital Licensing
A new paradigm for protecting digital content
Digital content owners today face no shortage of licensing options for regulating how media is shared and distributed. Blog posts, audio files, videos and other digital creative assets can be protected with a range of licenses that — in theory, at least — determine what can and can’t be done with the media.
The weak point in most existing licensing strategies, however, is enforcement. It is quite easy to attach licensing terms to digital content, but much harder to react when someone violates those terms. Indeed, simply identifying license violations is very difficult when content can be reposted anywhere on the Internet.
This is one significant problem in the media industry that Po.et, a blockchain-based digital ownership platform, is solving.
Media Licensing Challenges
If you own digital media or creative assets, you can choose to license it in virtually any way you wish. You could use an existing licensing, such as one of those offered by Creative Commons. Alternatively, could write a custom license tailored to your specific content ownership needs. Setting licensing terms is easy.
Yet in most cases, enforcing those terms is a tremendous challenge. That is because copying digital content is usually quite easy, regardless of licensing. So is modifying the attribution or ownership data associated with that content. There is little stopping someone from copying an article from one blog onto his own blog and reposting it under his own byline, for example, even if this violates licensing terms indicated on the original blog.
If someone shares, copies or redistributes digital content in a way that violates the licensing terms — whether out of malice or simple lack of awareness of the licensing requirements — you may not even be aware of the violation because you lack an automatic means of tracking how your content is being distributed.
As an example of how difficult it is to track license adherence, consider the fact that open source software licenses are routinely violated, in most cases because programmers who reuse open source code are ignorant of the specific licensing requirements that govern it (which can vary widely between different types of open source licenses).
Reacting to a licensing violation is even more difficult than finding one. In general, your only recourse is to sue. Bringing a court case against licensing violators is expensive and time-consuming. It may be impossible in situations where you cannot determine the identity of the offending party, or where the license violator operates in a jurisdiction where licensing laws are difficult to enforce through the courts.
Put simply, conventional licensing strategies for digital content are deeply flawed. No matter how sophisticated the license terms, there is simply no cost-efficient or easy way to enforce them.
Po.et’s Solution to Digital Licensing
If licenses could be automatically enforced using software, without relying on legal authorities for oversight, the challenges of license enforcement would disappear.
This is the approach to content licensing that Po.et takes. Po.et registers digital content ownership metadata on the blockchain, where licensing and other terms can be recorded in a fraud-proof way. Content owners can choose to use pre existing licenses or write their own.
The licensing terms — such as payment requirements and the transfer of ownership rights of digital assets — are automatically enforced using smart contracts. It is essentially impossible to violate the licenses because they are executed by software in a trustless fashion, rather than human actors.
In addition, because digital ownership is recorded on the blockchain, unauthorized redistribution or copying of content is easy to detect, and anyone who wishes to check on the licensing terms for a given piece of content can easily do so using data registered on the blockchain.
Conclusion
By removing the need for third-party oversight and trust from the digital content world, Po.et enables direct collaboration between content producers and publishers. It does so in an efficient way that obviates the need to invest in expensive licensing management services, or take legal action in order to enforce a licensing agreement.
For digital content, this is revolutionary. Thanks to Po.et, the ability and redistribute of digital media to be copied ad infinitum at virtually no cost — which is one of the great innovations of the digital revolution — is finally being balanced with the need for reliable ownership and attribution rights.
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