Using Copyright to Restore Balance for Creators
Since the beginning of June, we’ve made a big push to spread the word about ascribe. We’ve been working hard to explain why it’s so important to tackle the issue of intellectual property, copyright and attribution for creators.
Starting with digital art as a beachhead market, we’ve had a steady stream of creators, connectors and collectors reach out to us to express how much this resonates for them personally or for their business model.
The resonance isn’t only for digital art, but for photography, 3-D designs, music and books. Dozens of journalists in the tech, art, investing and cryptocurrency space have all written about how ascribe could be the best use case thus far for technologies enabled by Bitcoin.
The internet has seen 25 years of unfettered growth, leaving detritus of orphaned works where the creator is left unnamed. Even if the creator is properly attributed, the mechanisms for people to easily license work is full of barriers and friction. Copyright is in shambles.
As I was quoted in CryptoCoins News;
“Copyright is frustratingly localized, yet we live in a digital world where ideas are global and spread at the speed of light,” Pon says. “Ideas can be perfectly copied and instantaneously transmitted — and copyright hasn’t kept up. We need to give creators more tools to globally register, set license terms and gain visibility on their intellectual property.”
Ultimately, the point is to put money in the pockets of the content creators and give consumers the knowledge that they are getting authentic content that comes directly from the creators. ascribe enables this.
Looking at the big picture, we are heading into a world where automation, artificial intelligence and robots are going to drastically raise productivity. This means that society and industry can create much more, with much less money and fewer people. The logical outcome is that job growth in manufacturing and labour sectors will stagnate as robots, driverless cars, and AI replace labour, logistics and clerical jobs.
We have not only job stagnation, we also having rising inequality and wealth disparity — which undercuts the foundation of a healthy society and democracy.
To rebalance, economists generally agree on some key policy levers, smarter taxation on wealth and corporations, turbocharging re-training programs / education reform and concepts such as negative taxation, where people are guaranteed a minimum income to live.
Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee write about these ideas in The Second Machine Age and Thomas Piketty proposes policy measures in his Capital in the 21st Century.
These policies would help immensely.
But in the digital world, we are all creators. What makes us uniquely human, and what makes us different than machines, is our creativity. More needs to be done to protect intellectual property and creator attribution.
Creativity is supposed to be protected by copyright. It is in theory, but practically, the UX for copyright is broken. Copyright is expensive, unwieldy and varies across 180 countries.
Our goal is to re-brand copyright from being a dirty word that scares most people, and normally a tool wielded by corporations and lawyers, to a term that is universally seen as a re-balancer and equalizer for all creators.
Watch my 8 min TechOpenAir 2015 Ignite Talk. For more ideas, go to: blog.ascribe.io
