[Animats]

Well, the music industry wanted copyright with "no formalities", and that's in the TRIPS agreement. No more need to put a copyright notice on something, or send a copy to the Library of Congress.

Now the industry is whining that keeping track of who owns what is too hard. They dug their own hole. Let them deal with it. This is so typical of the music industry, which has been shooting itself in the foot since the invention of the tape recorder.

The article seems to be proposing some kind of a micropayment system, where every time someone buys a track of music, all the sub-payments to the various contributing parties get cranked out. That's not only too complicated, but the transaction volume would be huge. Bitcoin is not web-scale. The Bitcoin block chain is currently limited to about 7 TPS.

This idea comes back now and then. Ted Nelson's Xanadu had a micropayment system something like this. A bunch of fanatical libertarians tried to make it work. The free World Wide Web won out.

The amount of effort that the computer industry puts into keeping the music industry happy is excessive. Apple or Google could buy out the entire music industry for cash.

[malandrew]

I really wish we'd start calling it the music distribution industry instead of the music industry. Except for the musicians and the recording studios, it's never been about music. For everyone else, i.e. the overwhelming majority of those working in the industry, it's about sourcing a product an distributing it.

The "industry" is just a supply chain for auditory experiences, and when consumers became distributors as well, it cut out the supply chain folks. That is who is ultimately fighting back in all of this.

[hellbanTHIS]

I don't think he's proposing a micropayment system, more like a universal system to keep track of who worked on what song.

I think he's saying Katy Perry sends a song to Spotify along with a bitcoin-type address and at the end of the month they send the payment to that address, which divides it up between all the writers, producers and rights holders.

[tzs]

> Well, the music industry wanted copyright with "no formalities", and that's in the TRIPS agreement. No more need to put a copyright notice on something, or send a copy to the Library of Congress.

The US abolished the notice and deposit requirements via the Berne Implementation Act of 1988, almost a decade before TRIPS.

[Animats]

True, but then it went worldwide, and nobody kept records any more.

[epscylonb]

Agreed, I think what a lot of people misunderstand is that bitcoin is a terribly inefficient way of achieving consensus. No one is going to build mining farms just to protect digital rights.

Bitcoin has a chance at becoming a currency because in the past it has been hard to reach a global consensus on value.

It may be possible to use a bitcoin based timestamping solution like https://github.com/goblin/chronobit to record the rights, but I can't see where the incentive is for everybody to support a distributed database of such rights.