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Cybersecurity Research
  1. Conclusion

Conclusion

In Part 1, we stated that our research questions in this report were:

  1. What are the transactional costs of music licensing?

  2. What are the perceived benefits of automating music licensing via smart contracts?

  3. What are the legal and technical implications of automating music licensing?

  4. How are current decentralized streaming and multimedia content handling licensing?

  5. What are the current barriers to automating music licensing?

  6. What are the gaps in knowledge or know-how for automating music licensing?

  7. What web protocols exist, if any, for licensing intellectual property?

  8. What are the licensing models available for musical works?

  9. What are the legal boundaries affecting music licensing in an international context

  10. Can we conceptualize an automated music licensing framework(s)?

  11. What are the consideration in translating legal language into programming language

  12. What is the state of literature in this area?

  13. Should rights under copyright, if tokenized on a blockchain, be tokenized as fungible or non-fungible tokens?

Throughout the course of this report, we were able to answer or address all of them. In our Literature Review, we mapped the current state of the literature on automated legal applications in music licensing from four perspectives:

  1. Music Business Perspective

  2. Legal Perspective

  3. Automation Perspective

  4. Value Web Perspective

Each perspective discussed the wide and varying impacts of blockchain in the music industry and how each impact is different depending on the perspective. The music business perspective discussed that blockchain could lead to the development of a musician-centered ecosystem, but with concerns of getting buy-in from current industry stakeholders because of a lack of privacy over deal making and legal clarification of copyright and contract law on the blockchain. The legal perspective discussed the various legal issues that arise with blockchain for music including contract law, electronic signatures and transactions law, evidence, and copyright law. In each discussion of a legal concept, it was interesting to see how each area interacted with each other, and that many unexpected legal issues can arise with a blockchain. The automation perspective discussed the four automation approaches for music licensing that utilized blockchain and smart contracts (for issuing, purchasing, enforcing and tracking music licenses), the Semantic Web (for tracking musical works across the web and associated licenses), metadata (to track specific copies of a digital music file with watermarks while tracking transactions associated with said digital music files on the blockchain), and Ricardian Contracts (combining legal prose with programmable software components so that parties can securely sign and execute contractual documents through software and securely connect those agreements with external systems). The value web perspective discussed how value flows in the music industry have led to issues of transparency and unnecessary complexity, and a mapping of the value web of the music industry and stakeholders.

Then we moved on to provide a legal frameworks primer on copyright law, contract law, electronic transactions and signatures law, from a USA, EU, and international (copyright only) perspective. Before moving onto our technology primer, we provided a music licensing primer to discuss various aspects of licensing musical works.

Lastly, we provided a technology primer to discuss the relevant technologies (with an emphasis on Web3 technologies) for automating music licensing to conclude Part I.

In Part II, we discussed our motivation for developing a practical application of Web3 technologies to music licensing, the Terms of Service (ToS) of decentralized media platforms in the blockchain industry and whether any of the ToS gave users the option to license their works, and which specific licenses they could choose. In our review, the majority of ToS did not give users much flexibility in licensing their works on the decentralized media platforms. Only LBRY and Creativechain gave users the option of associating more than one license (though only for distribution of creative works) with their works uploaded to the platform. Thus, we see that there is a need for greater licensing options for creatives on decentralized media platforms to exploit the value of their creative works.

Then we moved on to discuss our licensing method, Practical Tokenized Drafting (PTD), and how we developed our Tokenized Music License (TML) on the OpenLaw platform. We developed the PTD method and provided commentary on our TML to provide guidance to drafters in developing their own RC-Web3 Templates, and so that others could review and expand upon our approach. Lastly, we discussed how we designed the TML to overcome the concerns and issues mentioned in the Literature Review in Part I. Lastly, we discussed the limitations on our research and future areas for research on automated music licensing.

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