What Is The Potential For Blockchain In Copyright And Licensing Applications?

How is blockchain technology influencing copyright and licensing applications? Read more to know all that is happening the realm of blockchain technology. Why go for blockchain technology?

What Is The Potential For Blockchain In Copyright And Licensing Applications?

An Introduction To Blockchain Technology

It is appeared to be in the early stages of a classic hype cycle about the potential uses of blockchain technology by all accounts as careful analysts need to filter out the noise just like all other technology bubbles with blockchain skeptics and blockchain enthusiasts.

Is the blockchain technology showing meaningful promise in the case of real-world copyright and licensing applications? It is good to take a closer look. The relevant questions are what are blockchain and what is it to be taken care of?

More than that why are so many startups and techno pundits going on and on about it. What are the problems to be solved and who has these problems? The most important question is what is it good for?

A block is a unique number derived mathematically through computing, to put it simply. Applied for single-use, this number typically would be the root identifier for any sort of digital work. Those examples of work protected by such a blockchain include pdf or the source code for a program, digital image or anything in a fixed form represented in ones and zeroes.

The root identifier once established, changes to digital work written into the blockchain which is then distributed through a network as all the parties participating in the block at each of whose locations third parties see the applicable updated information.

How Is Blockchain Affecting Everyday Life?

Blockchain categorized as distributed digital ledgers is explained such that the entire transaction history of any item provides with a blockchain updated and available to inspection.

It is always possible to use tokens to trade and not required and inevitable resulting in the use of technology. Cryptocurrencies rather introduce an additional element to theory and practice of blockchain which is an element of no concern to our focus here.

Those applications for which blockchain simply aren’t suitable are sure to come as critical when the reader finds many papers criticizing the hype around blockchain as a new “snake oil” and also suggesting that the technology holds promise.

Even if we assume that these limitations can and surely will overcome in the next few years, in terms of potential for the practical implementation of technology addresses important problems surrounding licensing in copyright and perhaps the other IP?

With copyright registrars and similar entities that create a blockchain to serve as a global registry, it is inviting significant rights holders and consumers in as nodes to meet the no-personal-trust-required mindset of blockchain enthusiasts.

When used in the service of creators and works, a blockchain derived content identifier could become one of the many unique identifiers already in place like that of ISBN, ORCID, DOI, ISNI, ISRC, and so forth. In exactly this vein, international standard content code is an experiment.

Blockchain Technology Helps Copyright Applications

A simple blockchain might bring the old poor man’s copyright as the simplest and easiest fix to a copyright problem, that boils down to create a simple timestamp for the work, snail mailing a copy via the USPS. as the latest technology of blockchain is unlikely to be of much use, it is used in mitigating run-of-the-mill infringement as it comes too easy to crop or screen-scrape or dumb-down the high-quality version recorded and created a “good enough to pirate” version likely to remain true for some time. 

Though there are significant difficulties with grayer areas of custom licensing it may even be unhelpful as it comes to legitimate fair uses, with blockchain serves as a natural fit helping in storing the sale and the terms of more of the routine licenses. Useful in such a context, maybe self-executing contracts limited to entries in the ledger. The license contract could essentially include the resale of rights as also the ledger could enforce it.

The blockchain technology also comes as quite useful in providing access to the public with updates in the reversion of rights back to the creator, or transfer to a new agent or other recorded rights transactions of that sort in the rarefied domain of copyright recordation, terminations, and transfers.  

In addressing real-world problems to which answers are sought by real people, it stands or falls on the usefulness it demonstrates as with any promising and potentially disruptive technology. With costs that come inevitable, they will be borne by the need to be convinced by the clear creation of new value. 

A Few Concluding Words Before Signing Off

As the real-world content and rights issues, those that industries depend on for copyright and licensing, have already been dealing with daily, a critical look a few steps ahead into a promising technology of the blockchain is that is warranted. 

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