Blockchain - if it is good enough for a currency, its good enough for royalty systems

The beauty of blockchain technology is that it offers a public ledger of transactions. The ledger cannot be tampered with. The information in the ledger is irrepudiable. It is the actual history of the transaction. No argument.

So we can see why companies are getting in on the act of patenting aspects of the technology in order to control the IP. The Economist has an article about this.

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21714395-financial-firms-and-assorted-startups-are-rushing-patent-technology-underlies

You can see that this is very important for the protection of IP. I was involved in the build of a major royalty system back in the 1990s when the internet was beginning to mature, and the organisational complexity of collecting and managing the complex sets of information are enormous. There are so many interested parties, with different agendas.

Thus the fascination of a blockchain technology to provide transparency on music usage and clear up royalty liabilities is attractive, highly complex, and becoming more of a possibility.

Most creative work of humankind can now be expressed in a digital format. Whether music, books, journalism, research, artwork, design, architecture and more. One of the few artistic creative pursuits which cannot be digitised is sculpture. The other is music performance, so much more commercial than digital recordings.

So engineers and scientists and businessmen are thinking through the ledger required to run royalty systems. Imagine each music recording having a digital blockchain piece of code, which can track how many times it is played. That information can be kept in a master ledger, so every 'play' on any device anywhere in the world will be registered. That is revolutionary, in terms of tracking activity.

It is rather like streaming music services, which track each play of a song. Those plays generate royalties and payments. This is very, very different to last century when records were sold and no one knew who listened, or how many times they listened. Now publishers and record companies can have a good chance of knowing exactly how many plays and by whom.

Imagine blockchain technology recording all that information in a nice secure manner. Imagine people having an account associated with their usage of digital creative works. Imagine the originators of creative works being accurately rewarded.

It is a far off dream, yes. But the possibility is there, and it will be rather amusing, depressing, challenging and illuminating to follow the way in which this technology matures. Imagine musicians making good money from recordings again. The world is a' changin'.

Licensing in advance of the commercial launch

When licensing content for a digital product (whether a book, music recording, film, perfume ad, TV show) the owner of the content will have high aspirations for their wonderful IP. They may even be demanding, and use that wonderful phrase, 'Well, if you want the Rolls Royce of content, if you want our content, well it is expensive. We like that. That is why we are so successful. You need our content, and you must pay the right price for it.

How does a business forecast the commercial value of IP in an electronic format? Electronic generally has destroyed the value of IP which brought enormous revenue as physical product (books, newspapers, music recordings, video releases).

So the product development has a large licensing cost from inception. This means in addition to all the technical costs and product development, design and production costs the licensing must be paid as a fee and most likely a royalty on sales as well.

How does the publisher juggle this? For example Spotify have to pay very, very large sums of money to the major record labels which own the recordings, and to the publishers which represent the authors of the songs (from the Beatles and Rolling Stones to Adele and new artists).

There is a great commercial tension. The owners of the IP can increase their absolute fee, and increase the percentage of gross sales they demand. This means that the distributor when successful can push back to try and maintain their margin. But all too often it is the IP owner with the power, and the IP owner can take the lion's share of revenue, leaving the distribution channel in their debt.

But the distribution channel also has power, a new type of power. This is because the distributor knows the customer. The distributor clearly knows the customer better now than at any time in the history of the planet. Knowing the customer is power, because algorithms will show what types of product they will like, and that enables the distributor to create the right kind of new content.

So the Distributor bites back at the IP Owner. Look at the way in which Netflix and Amazon have funded films based on their knowledge about customer tastes.

So the license fee is a duel. It is a permanent fight, between the IP content owner and the distributor. In some cases there are interesting ways of dealing with the commercial tension. For example with a major IP content owner, one distributor offered a new model on a take it or leave it basis. You can see the potential revenue, IP owner. Look on the revenue and we can uniquely deliver this revenue. But we will only do so if you lower the content fee. Without a lower fee for the IP we cannot survive, and you get nothin. Therefore IP owner, please play ball, and let's keep the commercial opportunity survive.

See further posts on the pattern of the new IP deals.
See further posts on the coopetition of distributors creating new content, and competing with their suppliers.
See further posts on strong-arm techniques of sites re-posting content they did not develop, but they get the advertising revnue (eg. Google News and it's controversy)

China's control of IP

In China, the element of control is legendary. Now we know that strict regulation is certainly an enemy of technological progress. But tech giants are more likely to be worried about the requirement to open up their data to the authorities in China.

There are fears that China’s new cybersecurity rules may block western innovation. To quote the MIT Technology Review, "The rules, announced Monday, will provide central Chinese authorities with greater powers over the monitoring of data and hardware. Notably, the laws will open companies up to far greater scrutiny from the government, demanding that Internet firms coöperate with the state’s criminal investigations and provide full access to data if officials suspect them of wrongdoing."

We have seen since Stalinist times that the authorities can ride in on a whim. Without even a suspicion of wrongdoing when they simply wish to monitor and find problems.

We already know that in China it is difficult to protect IP, so music, film, books and other creative works are pirated and made freely available. However when the 'West' finds out information about Chinese citizens the authorities wish to know about it.

After the election of Trump in the US it is possible that the American Dream of the last century will be changed, and possibly loose its allure and excitement. At the same time, we may find that moves like this lead to the faster rise of Asia as a controlling power in the world.



Read more:





https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602812/chinas-new-cybersecurity-rules-may-block-western-innovation/

Film, IP, China. Controlling perceptions of a country.

Wang Jianlin, chairman of the Dalian Wanda Group, the Chinese conglomerate that is emerging — controversially — as a superpower in the entertainment business is eloquent about who the Chinese company bought  AMC Theaters and Legendary Entertainment.

"But what about concerns that Wanda is moving aggressively in Hollywood as part of a move by the Communist Party to control the portrayal of China on screen?"

They have established a major incentive program to lure movie and TV production to the 408-acre Qingdao Movie Metropolis. This involved a 40% rebate on production expenditures.

The incentives plan was to be announced by Mr. Wang; Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles; Cheryl Boone Isaacs, the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; and Jack Gao, the head of Wanda’s Cultural Industry Group.

So the world is changing as IP and creativity is controlled by new interests, new entrants, new countries, new types of people, new perspectives. It was ever thus. New people taking control in the same ways as before, but with contemporary scale.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/10/18/business/media/dalian-wanda-goes-on-an-entertainment-shopping-spree.html

Knowledge Graphs - semantic indexing

Google became famous for Knowledge Graphs over recent years, bringing together all tine information on the public internet about people, places, ideas and so on.

This is actually semantic indexing. It has been around for a long time. It is rather useful because 'machines' can assemble relevant information, and give a human reader insights they did not notice before. Those machines start to seem rather 'clever' when really they are simply processing enormous amounts of information in a structured manner.

We have Knowledge Graphs of Musicians, Artists, performers, composers and so on. Look at this huge range from Orlando Gibbons to Adele:

Orlando Gibbons
http://musicweb.academicrightspress.com/artist/50b144fd-2012-4cd9-be65-62a09c3ddb44/Orlando%20Gibbons

Adele
http://musicweb.academicrightspress.com/artist/cc2c9c3c-b7bc-4b8b-84d8-4fbd8779e493

David Bowie
http://musicweb.academicrightspress.com/artist/5441c29d-3602-4898-b1a1-b77fa23b8e50/David%20Bowie

Bob Dylan
http://musicweb.academicrightspress.com/artist/72c536dc-7137-4477-a521-567eeb840fa8

So enjoy the thrill of finding relationships between Artists who worked together. It gets better and better as our project with a computer science department at a major university extends its findings.

Publishers need to please those who pay the bills

Advertising has paid for the costs and profits of advertisers for many centuries. In the Eighteenth Century the rags and pamphlets in London, Berlin, Moscow, Paris and Rome frequently had advertiser messages.

Nothing new in the electronic world. Well, it is different because electronic publishing allows us to count how many people see it, and estimate how many people read the ad, and measure how many people tap on the ad.

So who pays the most? Large corporations. It was ever thus.

Except sometimes a statistical outlier will raise the money to put their message in the publication. But usually it is the large corporations. How does this affect reporting? Even pop starts use their music to advertise products which would have been unthinkable in the 1970s. They would never have done it then, but because their recordings are now electronic and easily 'shared' with the world, needs to generate revenue have resulted in a different perspective on advertising. Pride in dealing with the big sponsors.

Control by the moneyed class. It was ever thus. So some bemoan the fact that Brexit Britain will be funded by China, and become a puppet state of China. Well, er... not that but it may become rather beholden to China in some unexpected ways. As China's outpost in Europe, paying the bills, China may call some shots.

This will arrect IP as well. We can expect that Film and TV may well be a commercial casualty, unable to charge consumers in China in the way the copyright owners expected. Food for thought.

We are all librarians now, filtering our swim through electronic information

Librarians have been the gatekeepers of information for their patrons for many centuries. They would make decisions on books for purchase, know where additional books could be accessed, know where journal articles were stored, know which bibliographic information would benefit a particular researcher.

Now each researcher, each scholar, has a world, a planet, seemingly a universe of information at their 'electronic fingertips'. Most people do not hesitate in impulsively saying, 'I know how to answer that' and launch on a search, and on reflection realise they need the assistance of a librarian to direct them towards relevant resources.

How many librarians regret the manner in which library patrons do not seek their advice. So the patrons go on long winded searchers? Could their research have been  speeded up, or at least focused? Probably.

Then a question arises about the value of information when it is electronic.

How do we inform library patrons that content, data, information, databases are paid for and not just available like an Internet search?
- Some companies will not license their books for electronic editions. They fear that electronic means automatic piracy.
- Some companies will not license data for academic research. They fear it will be copied and made available to university colleagues at other institutions.
- Some distributors of electronic databases worry deeply that the 'data' will be 'out there' and the value of the database will fall.
- Focus is on contemporary data.
- How quickly does information go into the public domain, when copyright holders would prefer to keep it copyright during the duration of their ownership of the information?

The whole concept of Public Domain is changing. An art museum can no longer stop tourists making photos of each painting on its walls. Will licensed academic information become 'Public Domain' in the same way? Simply because it is so easy to do? Simply because students do not perceive licensed information as any different to the free internet?

Already mighty upheavals are underway.