1. A PROPOSED TEST-CASE FOR BOTH ARCHIVAL AND CONTEMPORARY CONTEXTS
1.1 Introductory Terms and Tools: DCP and DAM
DCP
This document advocates for the creation of a Distributed Curation Platform (DCP) on Hyperledger Fabric, using the example of two musical formats: audio files (MP3, WAV, FLAC, etc) and NFTs (non-fungible tokens). The DCP will curate, document, and fairly manage media assets on the blockchain. It will accurately establish the provenance of an asset (its past) and assure that the asset’s creators or rights holders are properly acknowledged and remunerated in the future. For this reason, the DCP is suitable for museums, galleries, labels, and publishers on one hand, while proving equally helpful to artists or content creators on the other. In both environments the watchword will remain fairness. The following paragraphs outline a plan to build the DCP in a modular fashion, together with definitions of the relevant and manageable technologies.
And so, to reiterate, this document explains how to manage two musical formats:
- Audio files
- NFTs
In two environments:
- Curatorial (libraries, museums)
- Commercial (licensing, NFT auctions, etc.)
And from three points of view:
- Artist
- Publisher / Owner
- Public
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DAM
The DCP is a form of Digital Asset Management application (DAM), composing and deploying a smart contract on a Hyperledger Fabric Network. Users interact with this application via a user interface made using VueJS. DAMS ensure that operations are only performed on a digital asset by individuals (or organizations) that have the right access rights and permissions for the asset. The digital asset is defined as the content and its metadata. The metadata could be as simple as the name of the asset, the name of the owner of the asset and the date of creation of the asset, or it could be something more complex, such as extracted speech or lyrics (as subtitles). In any DAM, there can be any number of users, who in turn may have the ability to perform permission-specific actions. Examples of such actions include:
- User registration and user login.
- Viewing all existing assets in the system.
- Viewing assets owned by the user that is currently logged in.
- Uploading a new asset.
- Deleting an existing asset.
- Suggesting edits to an existing asset.
- Viewing suggested edits for an asset that is owned by the user that is currently logged in.
- Approving or denying suggested edits for an asset that is owned by the user that is currently logged in.
- Allowing other users the permission to update an asset owned by the user that is currently logged in.
- Assigning another user as the owner of an asset that is owned by the user that is currently logged in.
- Downloading assets.
The large number of users (participants) in this use case, as well as the different kinds of actions (transactions) executed, indicate a good use case for blockchain.
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1.2 Cultural Context and Schelling Foci
Early curatorial enterprise on the blockchain was celebrated in 2017 by Consensys’ own Engineer of Societies, Simon de la Rouviere. In his overview of P2P distributed curation markets (DCMs), de la Rouviere quoted Umberto Eco’s equation of curation or list-making with culture itself.
The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries.
The benefits offered by a blockchain DCP, de la Rouviere claimed, are not only decentralization and related systems of accountability. They also include the “the [cultural] wisdom of a crowd sharing at scale “ and micro-transactions or tokenized payments. Both will be addressed here.
There are certainly lots of existing content aggregation tools, operating with human or artificial intelligence. Given, however, that DCPs rely on both the filtering of information and an attribution of value to those selected assets, AI is (thus far) less likely to to attribute lasting or accurate cultural worth to any resulting list than a known, human entity within a relatively small and permissioned environment. Culture is a profoundly human and abstract activity, revolving around what many blockchain/DCP scholars like to term a ”Schelling (i.e., focal) point” of consideration. Some DCPs that have arisen around such foci are:
- Ocean Protocol — AI data pools
- Paratii — videos
- Messari — crypto projects
- Civil — journalism
- MedCredits — doctors
- District0x — marketplaces
- Native — communities
In all cases, a relatively small and specialized community creates worth in a permissioned or walled environment, within which individuals determine a value-system. We will move along the same lines, following a brief introduction into existing overlaps between Hyperledger and curated, value-making blockchains.
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1.3 HL Rights Management for Older or “Heritage” Assets. The Museum Network.
In building a test-case or POC, this DCP project will employ a large, existing audio database: a collection of approximately two million audio files that span the history of recorded sound in Russia. These files have recently been recently donated to the Wende Museum of the Cold War in Los Angeles (Instagram / Museum Review). What they require, over and above any issues of metadata, provenance, or rights management, is a public-facing API or decentralized streaming system of direct benefit to other archives, galleries, and publishers internationally. This use-case we will henceforth refer to as MN (“museum network”).
The physical collection from which the test files were partially generated can be seen here: these vinyl recordings, tapes, flash drives, mini-discs, traditional CDs, etc., will help the ME-SIG to define best practices for placing tangible, often antique objects on the blockchain.
The MN will be built with two primary emphases in mind:
- Digital lending with ISCCs (see below)
- Decentralized curation and records management
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1.4 HL Rights Management for Contemporary and Future Assets. The Contemporary or Commercial Network.
In addition, MN will grow parallel to a more contemporary or commercial alternative, designed to help the work of living artists alive today from the same eleven time zones. The API or UI for this network (henceforth “CN”) will focus upon the following issues:
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- Easier access to (and the improved exchange) of better metadata
- Compensation for the composers of audio works using ISCCs*
- Support for the micro-sale of sync licenses across social media. (How might an individual or company legitimately license and share the work of a major artist, say, on social media?)
- Support for the tokenization of audio with Hyperledger’s Fabcoin and/or NFTs**
- Support for healthier competition in the subscription market. (How might an individual launch a subscription service for my customers/audience and easily access proper licenses?)
- and a geo-sensitive/hyper-localized news service. News of cultural or political worth will be embedded in a map, showing (in cultural cases) the geographic origin of a file and (in journalistic cases) verifiably true statements about both local events and regional politics. As a result, CN will aid freedom of speech and freedom of expression in territories where both are rare. Evidence of background work is gathered here.
It is hoped that one API or app will suffice for both MN and CN, with either different interfaces and/or functionality to meet divergent needs. Those divergences might include the expression of rights (i.e., rights-expression languages or REL) and matters of post-transaction fulfillment (DRM, access control). Alternatively, those same functions—for example the presence or absence of payment details—could be embedded into the files themselves, thus largely eliminating the need to separate or isolate a museum collection from a contemporary or commercial equivalent. One app, two forms of access: archival or commercial. Non- or for-profit, filtered by the app’s search engine.
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2. HYPERLEDGER AND MUSIC
2.1 Background and Current Context
Hyperledger’s vision statement of 2018 highlighted multiple aspects of rights attribution. The in-house HLF project name-checked most often was Dot Blockchain Media (dotBC), a music content rights registry and transaction processor across a then-purported network of more than 63 million compositions. (doTB has since morphed into Verifi Media and Cardstack, where permissioned blockchains are now combined with the versioning tools of GitHub to create “gitchains.”)
Boston’s Open Music Initiative was also referenced in early Hyperledger materials. Housed in the Berkelee College of Music, the OMI continues today to leverage HLF as a non-profit network of “leading academic institutions, music and media industry organizations, creators, technologists, entrepreneurs and policy experts.” They, like dotBC, worked towards an open-source protocol for the uniform identification of music rights holders and creators.
These efforts were then celebrated by Irving Wladawsky-Berger. Here, simultaneous with HL’s 2018 mission statement, Berklee’s spinoff Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship (ICE) was singled out for praise, along with MIT’s Media Lab, IDEO and Context Labs. At this time the ICE already boasted over 200 members including Sony, Universal, and Warner, together with Spotify, Pandora, Netflix, SiriusXM, YouTube, and Alibaba.
Quoting an article in Wired, Wladawsky-Berger hoped to use blockchains or decentralized databases to bridge the “serious information gap... or disconnect between the person who composed a song, the person who recorded it, and the subsequent plays... No-one owns the information, but everyone can access it... Keeping track of this metadata [will mean] artists and platforms can leverage it various ways without fear of violating rights.” Hence the OMI’s Minimum Viable Interoperability APIs (MVI 1.0), syncing data associated with recordings, musical works, creators and right holders.
And so, with most frequent reference to Sawtooth (made publicly available in early 2018), HL was looking to “replace monolithic central systems with an approach based on interoperability among existing databases and distributed transactions.” Parallels were drawn with the Ethereum blockchains of Canada’s CoreRights or Consensys’ Ujo Music, who worked on smart contracts with London singer/songwriter Imogen Heap and her blockchain advocacy group Mycelia.
In this same spirit of curatorial inclusion, value-creation, and proper attribution, it is therefore proposed that the ME-SIG embody the inclusive 2020 vision of Ashna Gupta. Her example of music is translatable to other digitized narratives, be they e-books, photojournalism, e-games, or movies.
Imagine this: a single platform where you can search for a song and uncover a record of every single player that has touched that song from inception to delivery. Every songwriter, producer, sound engineer, and everyone in between. Imagine a transparent revenue-sharing model that pays artists their fair share of royalties right away. Imagine a world of increased trust and accountability between artists and large media corporations
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