From Web 2.0 to Web 2016: The Need for Public Platforms for Digital Ownership
From my reading it sounds like this blockchain-based proof-of-copyright is a solution looking for a problem.<p>IANAL, but from what I understand damages for copyright infringement are high.  Today if an individual has their copyright infringed by a corporation, and that infringement is big enough to get a significant award, I think a plausible outcome is a lawyer helps them on contingency and arrives at some reasonable settlement.  I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s super hard to prove you created something around the time you say you did, and even if that fact is murky, corporations usually know what they did and didn&#x27;t create and nobody wants a drawn-out legal battle; so a settlement is not an unlikely outcome.<p>In the reverse case, as we all know corporations are not shy about suing individuals for infringing on copyright.  In that case the corporation, with its huge legal power and ostensibly better documentation, typically extracts whatever they wish from the infringer (anyone remember the ruinous &quot;settlements&quot; for the RIAA file sharing lawsuits of the early 2000&#x27;s?).  If the corporation for some reason can&#x27;t win, then it can consider the loss a cost of doing business.<p>In cases where the infringer is unreachable (anonymous website hosted in Sealand), proof of ownership wouldn&#x27;t be helpful anyway.<p>What we need isn&#x27;t some kind of super fancy digital copyright registry, what we need is copyright reform to bring balance back to the public good, away from megacorporations and the rent-seeking grandchildren of the grandchildren of the original creators; and a push back to requiring registration of copyright to be granted protection.