Intellectual Property Online: YouTube Red And The Blockchain

     Last week Google announced plans to roll out a $9.99 monthly subscription-based YouTube membership. The membership is called YouTube Red and it will give subscribers access to ad-free user-generated content (UGC) including original shows starring YouTube’s most popular creators, a gaming app, and the long-awaited YouTube Music service. YouTube Red is an exciting move that will set new industry standards and for the first time will give content creators a larger platform from which to address a paying market.

     As a major leader in digital content creation, the new streaming initiative will have to address the challenges of charging for digital content. These will include:

1. Understanding the type of UGC the public is willing to pay for

2. Ensuring that exclusive content is not pirated

3. Compensating creators properly for their work to incentivize content publishing (mainly a concern for YouTube Music) 

     The answer to the first issue lies deep in the troves of Google’s user data. Google knows what people want and don’t want. It’s a consumer-focused concern, which Google and large tech firms generally do a superlative job at addressing. The second question however, is more convoluted. Historically the Internet community has not been particularly respectful of intellectual property, especially not with music. With the integration of YouTube Music and Google Play, Google will be tasked with making sure that digital music retains value and that rights holders are compensated. In many ways it’ll be similar to how Google already manages accounts, but with new subscriptions to acquire much more will be at stake.

     The third challenge is the toughest. Currently, digital music credits and rights management is a mess. Royalty payments for streams are terribly low, and require an obscenely long processing period before payments ever reach creators. Because ownership of a musical work can be shared by multiple entities, rights information are often spread across the globe in an untraceable disorder. For every contributor to be compensated properly, each track must include accurate metadata, listing each individual involved in the creation of a work. However, that’s usually not the case. Since music has been on the Internet, the industry has failed to maintain accurate records of rights information

     To do YouTube Red right, Google will have to pioneer a rights management initiative that protects, disambiguates, and organizes the world’s digital IP information. A database of ownership rights metadata has never been successfully compiled (See GRD for reference), but if anyone can do [it,] it’s Google. They’re the top of the totem pole in terms of  sheer content and technological capacity, and they also have deep enough pockets to fund a project of this scope. So the question isn’t so much if Google can solve the IP problem, but how they will do it?  

     Without hesitation, I would offer the bitcoin blockchain as the technology for the job.

Put simply, the blockchain is a distributed ledger system used to store information cryptographically so that it can never be altered

     Information written to the ledger can be programmed to execute commands like distributing payments or sending data. The technology is also open source, meaning that programmers can fork the code and build extensions to fit diverse use cases. One of those use cases is IP rights management, and several companies are already developing blockchain applications to register all types of IP on the blockchain.

     One very advanced project comes out of a German company called Ascribe. Like its competitors, Ascribe offers content creators a way to register their works online by ‘ascribing’ original media to the bitcoin blockchain. Once a work is registered on the blockchain it is time stamped and published on a public ledger displaying the metadata associated with each work. The information could then be programmed to perform actions like immediately releasing payments to relevant parties in the event of a stream or download. Soon, their technology will also be able to scan uploaded content for one-of-a-kind watermarks to prove unique ownership and track the use a digital work. One of the company’s executives summarized the importance of registering content with a pithy equation: perfect providence=perfect ownership.

     The technology could also develop the capability to perform reverse media searches that would yield ownership information upon a search on a digital file. By employing all of these features, widespread adoption of Ascribe could bring us close to the creation of an intellectual property database. For YouTube Red, exploring this opportunity could help protect not only its native creators but also digital content at large.

     As I mentioned before, tech companies have done an awesome job at making digital content accessible to consumers. But many times, the special treatment we’ve received has come at the expense of content creators. Now more than ever, Google has an incentive to protect the creations of its artists. My hope is that they will provide original creations with the highest level of protection and set a precedent for streaming services and producers of digital content. With the reach and power it wields, Google has the means to build an equitable infrastructure of digital intellectual property rights. 

Intellectual Property Online: YouTube Red And The Blockchain