[parkan]

Declaring ownership and provenance with complete certainty is very hard, which is why we don't profess to do it. Our approach is to nondestructively aggregate potentially conflicting claims and allow for more nuanced resolution at read time, as appropriate for a given situation. In your particular example, we would have a chain of derivative works.

Obviously, in certain cases (payment routing) a definitive answer is required, but this is already something that PROs and similar organizations deal with on a daily basis, and we can support their arbitration.

[sandworm101]

If you plan on linking money to content, you better have a really definitive answer. That movement of money is essentially the purchase of a license. If a business or individual relies on your answer as to who that license should be purchased from, they do not want to be hit with a copyright complaint should the real owner appear. And if people end up abusing your system to monetize content that they should not, expect all sorts of legal docs in the mail.

[parkan]

Absolutely! Spotify's 30M settlement with NMPA is a great example of this kind of failure in existing systems