Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

Would I pay a streaming service $10 a month for 10 tracks, that I can only listen to on their service, but which I get unlimited plays of so long as I subscribe to their service? Hell no.

Would I purchase an album of 10 songs, that are mine into perpetuity to listen to, make reasonable copies of, fair use of, etc, for $10? Yes.

Would I pay a streaming company for on demand access to a broad catalog of songs? Yes.

But note how my consumption and value varies.

The thing is, streaming services are, fundamentally, gainining 'per listen' value, and that model is reflected into how they're paying rightsholders. That is, the more I listen to a track, the more value it collects for the owner.

A purchasing model is how many purchases. Listens are not really correlated to that (at least, not to the price). That is, one user may listen to the purchased album 100 times, the other may listen to one song 100 times, and one user may listen to the album 1000 times. All paid the same, all generated the rightsholders the same.

As such, I think treating streaming as a storage medium would be...poorly thought out. Not least of all because at that point you could make a strong case that the streaming service should be paying every rightsholder for every subscriber; they are, after all, -storing- that music for the new subscriber; nevermind if the subscriber ever listens to it or not.

It won't, and it's a strawman you are setting up. Of course you have to design your business logic and rules and answer all the questions. There's nothing a blockchain, a relational or a nosql database will do for you there. They will give you different options and different tradeoffs. The point here is that this distributed solution has interesting trade-offs and opportunities that makes this a good match for this particular problem, regardless of rules of what defines a song or how licensing rights rules are defined.

> BTW. Again. That same word, database. Nothing a relational database couldn't handle with much more ease and efficiency.

Yes, sure. You can have a third party with a central relational database that does all that, and all companies trust it. The proposed solution is more akin to a relational database replicated between all interested parties. All the parties having the same vision of immutable data allows interesting tradeoffs for this particular problem, that's all. No one is claiming it will identify or classify songs for you.

> Because blockchain is a magical technology that transmits all this information directly into your brain without the need of APIs.

No, because you can design a solution where any interested party can join the network and have a copy of the data. Or not. Trade-offs.

> Also, the article you linked is a bunch of demagoguery

I think it's a very pratical way of understanding the oportunities and capabilities that open up with new technology, particulary if you have a knee-jerk reaction such as shown above. Scepticism is healthy particularly given all the hype and magical promises around it but if you look at it through the framework proposed there I hope you can see how it opens design space that was unpractical before.

It was consistent with filmmaking tradition when Snow White was made. It's not anymore because the previous century's worth of work is locked up behind essentially perpetual copyright.

Disney used public domain works as inspiration but then pulled up the ladder behind them so that future artists can't do the same.