- Problem: copyright seems to limit a lot of potential value from being realised, but it also seems to have some nice features (especially around justice and distribution of surplus) that we may not want to throw out - Solution: treat this like other forms of property, and thus solve with a "land" value tax on a posted must-sell valuation - Find that 80k episode with Vitalik where he explains the idea for land - Basically, Taylor Swift posts the valuation for *something* - probably 'one use of X song'? Rather than the copyright in total. But maybe the latter as well. - This goes on "the blockchain" or something - having a public distributed ledger seems like it would be useful here. Need to expand on this. - Small YouTuber then does a transaction to buy one use of it and uses it in their video - This produces more consumer surplus because people would rather listen to good music (maybe Taylor Swift was a poor choice here...) than the bad version of royalty-free muzak - Maybe you could trace royalties this way too? I've heard people talk about that; seems hard to definitively pin down - like are you tracking waveforms or something? Isn't this in some ways what YouTube already does with its automated copyright system, and that works poorly? Trivially: pitch-shifting a piece of music seemed to circumvent it for some period of time (maybe not any longer) - So - maybe rather than a price per se, it's like you have to post some contracts of certain structures or something - needs more work - Now the fun bit: levy a tax (somehow, needs more definition) on whatever the posted price of that contract is. - This means that the owner has the proper incentive to release the valuation. Too high, too much tax (such that they're paying more than how much they *actually* value "creative control" etc.); too low, everyone buys it trivially. - Other bits and pieces: - Politics etc. - like how do we handle the case of Trump using an artist's song. Maybe we just accept this loss? My paternalist instincts say this is bad idea because the general public can't be trusted to appropriately distinguish how much social credit to apportion where. - Similarly there's still problems with the use of small artists: like Disney just buys the thing, uses their audience, and the small creator does not get the benefits of exposure. Asymmetry in ability to 'get in front of' the audience.