In the past I've sold parts of my rights to a publisher, in exchange for cash, who then was incentivized to go out and licenses some songs for obscure commercial purposes. It made both of the publisher and myself some money.
It's kind of a fantastic way of doing business. Publishers work as speculative investors and help to spread the risk of creating intellectual property. It only works if we treat the "song" as the item of property, and not "me". I can't be bought and sold on a marketplace, rather my songs are.
In the time of patronage, it wasn't the intellectual property that was bought and sold, rather the artist. Slavery and patronage are very related systems of organizing human capital. They're both based around primitive ideas of the relationship between labor and capital.
What we developed in the subsequent five hundred years is really much better than what this article is arguing for a return to.
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EDIT: I haven't been able to comment for the last 40 minutes or so with a "too many comments, slow down" warning... I think it is a bug...
so patcon:
As soon as you consider a "song" an asset that can be bought or sold, you're dealing with the notion of copyright.
What you're describing will only work if there are certain fundamentals in place, namely, that the "song" in question is generating profits either through royalties or direct licensing.
So in order for a futures market to develop, the assets in question need to have the ability to create earnings so then investors can discover a speculative price for the underlying asset, based on the profits they think the song will generate.
In order for this to happen we need people and software to honor the notion that the author and whomever he sold assets in his "song" are due said royalties and other types of direct or indirect payments. That is, we need to honor their rights as to how copies are distributed and paid for.
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Still can't comment...
ThomPete:
We're building a solution on top of just that kind of unnatural artificial scarcity, the Bitcoin blockchain:
We're still working on pretty much everything and are somewhat close to a launch (~2-3 weeks? but we've been saying that for 3 months, you know how it is...)
Anyways, in the meantime we've been publishing a lot of code, so most of this stuff does in fact work as intended, just there's a decent amount of moving parts that had to be invented from scratch and devilish details abound...
Anywho, take a look... but please, be kind about the existing copy and lack of documentation... we'd love some feedback as well! Spelling mistakes, etc.
Marketing Copy:
http://blockai-front-page.herokuapp.com/
Code:
https://github.com/blockai/openpublish
https://github.com/williamcotton/blockcast
https://github.com/blockai/bitstore-client
https://github.com/blockai/abstract-common-blockchain
https://github.com/blockai/react-image-publisher
https://github.com/blockai/react-published-images-list
https://github.com/howardwu/react-openpublish-assets
https://www.npmjs.com/~andrewmalta
https://www.npmjs.com/~howard.wu
https://www.npmjs.com/~williamcotton
Screenshots:
https://bitstore-test.blockai.com/mqMsBiNtGJdwdhKr12TqyRNE7R...
https://bitstore-test.blockai.com/mqMsBiNtGJdwdhKr12TqyRNE7R...