 and we're live. Hi, I'm Dazza Greenwood, a scientist at MIT Media Lab and I run law.mit.edu and this video is a flipped classroom prep session for the next MIT computational law course happening this January. And the key focus is of course music this year with our partners at Berkeley College of Music and the Open Music Initiative. And so today what we wanna do is focus in deep on copyright law and music licensing with co-instructor for the course, George Howard, faculty member at UC Berkeley and one of the original founders and lead researcher at the Open Music Initiative. So thanks for taking the time to get people prepped for your session on Wednesday, January 16th, George. And maybe you could introduce yourself a little more and provide a little more context and then get right into copyright and music licensing. Absolutely and what a pleasure to be working with you on this project. So thank you for setting this up and I'm broadcasting today from the cold wintery North Shore of Boston and eventually it'll warm up here. But one point of clarification, it's Berkeley College of Music, not UC Berkeley, but I think I'm sure it was just a, yes, it's okay. But so by the way. I'm from the East Bay originally and like sometimes by native roots, while you are not the first person who has ever confused Berkeley College of Music with Cal Berkeley, believe me. So as way of background, I am a guitar player and been playing all my life and I think I was born that way, I'll die that way and everything else is just sort of noise in between. But it's been a winding path to get here. I'll make this sort of brief, but I think it's relevant. I started a little record label in my dorm room a million years ago and my timing was good. It was sort of the Nirvana era. So a lot of big labels thought that the fortunes rested in the hands of youngins like myself who had their ears to the ground and they gave us disproportionate sort of value and credit. But I wrote that as well as I could. I signed a bunch of bands. Some of them did well. My little label was then purchased by a bigger label which was notable as being the first CD-only label, a label called Record Disc. And it was a really, really great and innovative label. I then was promoted up by Chris Blackwell, who was the founder of Island Records, signed Bob Marley, U2 and many others to run Record Disc at an age that I was way too young and unprepared for as an English major didn't know what the hell I was doing. But they gave it my best shot and we ended up selling the label to Warner Music Group in 2004 or five and did okay there. I then co-founded a company with one of my close friends named Jeff Price called Tunecore. And the gesture of Tunecore was in 2004 or five, iTunes had just emerged, but as an artist and still true to this date for the most part, you couldn't get your music up onto iTunes and now really any of the streaming services of Spotify's changed things a little bit without going through some sort of label or intermediary. And our conceit with Tunecore was, well, we'll provide that service but we're not gonna take any back end. Both Jeff and I were varying still hard, very disenfranchised by the habits and the norms of the traditional labels and find them typically to not be favorable for artists. So we didn't wanna replicate that, provided a service, took a fee for that service, but didn't take a quote unquote royalty. Tunecore grew to be the biggest independent distributor of music and has returned more than a billion dollars to artists. So, and we sold that company to Believe Music in 2014 or 15. Along the way, I ended up getting a law degree. I was a what you call an entrepreneur in New Orleans and got my MBA down there as well. Dominately because I'd been so royally screwed in various transactions in my life because I was outclassed by lawyers and MBAs, I was like, what is it gonna keep happening? So I wanted to learn the rules. Started a consulting business, advising artists and managing artists as well as non music entities. I managed Carly Simon and the composer Mark Isham. And started advising big companies from CVS Pharmacy to Brown University to Easter Seals on sort of how to better use technology to sort of emphasize purpose over product, which is the thread of my consulting firm. But it was all very much formed and framed by what I'd learned in the music business. I have long used the term or expression that music is a canary in a coal mine. And as the music industry goes, other industries almost inevitably follow. So there are good learnings to be gleaned from that or at least it's been a useful thesis for myself. But really what dawned on me a few years ago in keeping with purpose not product is that all of the stuff that I've done in my so-called life is really a byproduct of the greater purpose, which for me is to help artists create sustainable careers on their own terms. That's what I do. I remember R.E.M, probably my favorite band before they broke up on their last tour, they would, Michael Stipe would stand on stage and say, we're R.E.M and this is what we do. And what I do is very best to help artists create sustainable careers on their own terms. I think art is an empathy machine. I think art tends to get short-shifted for some reason. It's not as impactful as it should be, but I know that we as humans have a real need to create and we need to embrace that. There are rules around it. And of course like this is something that is meant to elucidate some of those rules, but then to be very much a practical way of application. I've structured my life so that I'm a straddle academia and actually being out in the field. So I love teaching. It's my bliss. It's something I get to do, I'm privileged to do, but I pay the bills by going out and working with other companies. And there's a nice symbiotic relationship between what I learned there and then what I'm able to report back to the classroom and vice versa, by the way. Being able to be in front of a bunch of 19-year-old artists helps me have a worldview that I feel lucky to have in my life. But the other sort of threat in my life, ever since I was a little kid, learning how to code on a Commodore 64 was that I just naturally gravitate towards technology. As I said, RICO was the first CD-only label, which at the time was very high-tech. RICO was the first label with its own website. And so I just gravitate towards that. And about, I don't know, five years ago now, I read the Satoshi White Paper. I was far less interested in Bitcoin than I was in blockchain, the underlying technical substrate. And so that began a really long, ongoing deep dive around decentralized distributed ledgers, which resulted in just countless articles and a book on the topic. But again, all through this lens of how does this help artists. Interesting to me and Daza, you've been so instrumental in helping shape my thinking on this, there is a very clear linkage between distributed ledger tech and copyright law and art. And I don't think it's me just cramming a square peg through a round hole. I think it actually works. And so on the second day of our workshop, we're really gonna try to dive deep in showing not telling in order to sort of prepare for that. I wanna go through just a little bit of an overview on the important salient points of copyright law, how it intersects with the current market and efficiencies in the market and then how technology in particular, blockchain for a better word can potentially and I think actually obviate some of those challenges in the service of the artist. And so I'll just sort of dive in from there. That's okay. Great. So I think that the most important thing to start with and for many people, this will be obvious, but for far more than you would think it is not. Music copyright is unlike other intellectual property in the copyright sense. Copyright can copyrights fungible. It applies to films, to TV, to books, to pantomime, to architectural renderings. Obviously to music as well. The difference between music and the others is that at source, when you create a musical work, a song, two copyrights are generated. And to be clear, copyright is generated not through registration, but copyright occurs when you create an original work of authorship and fix it in a tangible form. Each one of those words, which is defined in the United States Code, and we'll put references to the various elements. I'm not gonna cite them here, but we'll reference them. But those words, a fixation of original work of authorship in tangible form are carefully articulated and really do show some of the challenges here. Recently, of course, there's been the long and recently settled suit between, or adjudicated, suit between the Marvin Gaye estate and Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams over originality, quite honestly, of blurred lines. The song versus, gotta give it up, the song by Marvin Gaye. And there's a sort of play on words here, but the fact of the matter is originality, there's no bright line for that. It's a blurred line. And it's unfortunately, unlike, I think it was a Justice Story or Justice Brandeis or whatever who said that the obscenity, you know it when you see it. It's a little trickier to do that with songs. I think by most people in the field, when they hear the Robin Thicke song, they'll say, yeah, sure, it was maybe influenced, maybe the vibe is similar to the Marvin Gaye work, but it's not plagiarism, right? It's not in the sense of taking wholesale phrases or, but they lost the case. And so that to a greater or lesser degree has sort of sent a chilling effect into the market in terms of we don't know where that line of originality is. So in any case, so creating an original work is not necessarily as simple as you would think. One of the focus of, or a folk eye of day two will be joint works, which then you have to think about, you know, which party is contributing what and how much and how much of it is original. So originality is important, original work, it's just the definition of a work. If I just hum something without the intent to create a work, it's not a work, you know, it says a Burroughs Giles case with the lithograph of Oscar Wilde that sort of showed that there needs to be actual, they call it at the time sort of a sweat of the brow that the author was actually trying to make a work. And then authorial intent, duration, you know, de minimis, like how long does it have to be? All of these things are elements that when you think about music copyright need to be sorted through. As I said, registration does not get you copyright. Registration allows for you to bring soup in case of infringement and then collect damages if you win. So content creators out there, you need to be aware that if you write a work and it's an original work authorship and you fix it, you write it down or you notate it, you do have the copyright, but if someone infringes on that, you wake up one day and you realize that someone has sampled taking a piece of your work and put it into theirs and it's getting a lot of radio play. If you haven't registered that work, it will be impossible and really impossible to sue unless and until you do. And even once you do register, you're only able to sue for the time since you registered. So if your work had been being used and infringed upon for years, it's only after you sue. So you have to register that you can sue. So registration is important, but it doesn't give you the work. So as I said before, there's two copyrights that you get or that are created when a work is created. And one, for the purpose of this class, we're gonna call the composition, right? And that's the song itself. And I always use the mnemonic of the C with the circle for the composition, which stands for copyright. But back in the day when there were liner notes, you would see a C with the circle and then you see a P with the circle. Both reference copyright, both just mean copyright, but the C with the circle relates to this idea of the composition, the song itself, the melody and the lyric. And point of fact, it really means the idea of the work and then the physical manifestation. You can't copyright an idea, you copyright be the actual sort of rendition of the idea. So that melody and lyric is the copyright. And that is almost always under controlled by the person who writes the song and his or her publisher, right? In the music industry, you have publishers, you have labels, publishers historically, and things are changing, but this is still relatively set. Publishers historically work only with songwriters, people that write the song. So it's important to have a little bit of history, but it wasn't really until the mid to late 50s, early 60s, where at any scale, you had people who were performing the songs that they wrote. I know this is a very, you know, the music business was formed on a firmament of racism and it continues to this day. So the idea that there weren't people of color and writing and singing their own songs is laughable. Of course there weren't, right? Along the floor Bob Dylan and people began being known as songwriters. The point of fact, Little Richard was writing his own songs and recording them as a singer-songwriter, but never got the credit that he was due. It was given to Dylan and Dylan's my hero, so it deserves anything to get, but he wasn't the first, nor were the Beatles, or the Rolling Stones. In fact, the first Beatles record and the first Stones record were covers. And by that, I mean renditions of other people's songs. Frank Sinatra never wrote a song. Elvis Presley never wrote a song. They all were performers that covered, that sang someone else's work. And the publishers were the people that would find the songwriters and then match them or try to match them with performers. But their sort of swim lane was, okay, we're going to work with songwriters, protect, license those works, and then they would license them to the other copyright holder, which is the performer. And that for this, of course, we'll use a P with a circle on it. So you have the C side, and that's for the composition. And then the copyright for the P is for the sound recording. It's with a P because it stands for phonorecord, but nobody calls it that. So we'll just use sound recording. The copyright code calls it musical works now, which I think is wildly confusing, but we'll call it sound recording. So the sound recording is owned or controlled almost always by the performer of the song and or the label who releases the song. So there's a very, very quick example. Paul Anka wrote a song called My Way. He and his publisher was the own or control the copyright to the C, the composition. Frank Sinatra, of course, popularized that song on reprise records, which was on the Capitol Records. And Capitol Records owned the P, the sound recording for Frank's song, Frank's rendition of Paul Anka's My Way. Frank received a royalty for the sale of that. Paul Anka received a different type of royalty for the reproduction and distribution of that song. Another example, Dolly Parton wrote a song called I Will Always Love You, back in 78 or something. Released it, she was the holder and her publisher for the C for the song I Will Always Love You. I forget which label originally released it, but they put that out. But then a decade or so later, there's a film called The Bodyguard with Kevin, whatever his name is, and Whitney Houston sings the hell out of I Will Always Love You. It's the rendition that most people know. Whitney Houston didn't write that song. In point of fact, Arista Records who released The Bodyguard soundtrack that has that Whitney's version on it had to license the C, the composition from Dolly Parton's publisher. And then that enabled Whitney to do a rendition of it and Arista Records to reproduce and distribute that rendition without it infringing on her works. Dolly and her publisher made a fortune from the licensing fees for the reproduction and distribution, not to mention public performance when the song was played on the radio. And Whitney and Arista Records made a fortune from the sale, the reproduction and distribution of the P at the time, the vinyl, the CD, the cassette. Now the download of the stream. And Whitney and now her estate receive a royalty of the profits from the exploitation, the reproduction distribution streaming of the P even while Dolly still keeps getting the money from the C. So it's a little tricky. We'll put some resources out there, but you gotta know that. You can't be working in the music business whether as a performer or a songwriter, anyone in the industry without understanding the sort of bicameral, the two kind of copyright that are relevant to the music. And probably you can see just from the beginning of this little talk, how confusing this stuff can get when you've got these licenses back and forth. So the good news is, once you sort of grasp that there's the C that stays with the songwriter and the P that stays with the person who releases the song, usually the label, the rights that each party has that are enumerated in the copyright code mirror each other, but for a couple of very small exceptions, however there's exceptions across, like, calculable problems. And I'll go through them here now, but we'll also provide a resource point. So when you create a work, and again, whether that work is a song, let's do the song first. So you're a songwriter. I pulled my guitar out that's over there. I write myself an original song. I record it here into my iPad. I got to copy it. And so what do I get with that? And again, I didn't have to registering. Registration just allows me to bring suit. But what I get is a bunch of exclusive rights and these are enumerated. I get the right to reproduce. I get the right to distribute, the right to display, which is not terribly relevant in the music business except for things like sheet music. I get the right to create derivatives, which is hugely relevant. Derivatives is sort of a fancy word that it's dominantly means in today's parlance samples, but it's more than that. Translations are derivatives. So if you've ever seen the Big Lebowski when I think it's the Gypsy Kings do Hotel California in the bowling scene, that's not a cover. That's because it's a translation. That's a derivative work. You've derived a new work from an existing one. So I have that right. I've got reproduction distribution, display, create derivatives, and then publicly perform. Publicly perform is the most complex and arguably the most important. Public performance is not limited to me standing up on a stage and singing though it does include that. Public performance means either through an IRL in real life or through broadcast, my work being put into the air into a setting which is more than just family members essentially, right? That's a public performance. So websites, restaurants, you know, car lots, not movie theaters, oddly, there's an exemption for movie theaters and we can talk about that. But TV networks, venues of course, all of them must have a license in place with the songwriter in order for that songwriter's music to be publicly performed. And again, that doesn't mean the songwriter shows up and plays because we've played off of a CD, radio, whatever. And if you think about the way music is consumed today and through websites, Spotify, whatever it does, all have a public performance element and it's growing like crazy. So you see this sort of tremendous growth and yet it's very, very confusing. So those are the rights on the seaside. They mirror or neighbor, and you'll understand why I'm saying that in a second, on the P side. So in other words, the songwriter has the right to reproduce the song. So too does the P holder have the right, exclusive right to reproduce their version. So, Dolly Parton has the exclusive right to reproduce her C of I Will Always Love You. Eris de Records has to license that right from Dolly for Whitney to do a version of it so that they can then reproduce via a download, a stream, a CD vinyl without infringing. But they both have exclusive rights. One has the right for the reproduction of the composition. The other has the right for the reproduction of the sound recording. There needs to be licensed. Now obviously, if you are the songwriter and the performer and you're releasing it yourself, you don't need to license it from someone. But when you bring in these other parties, deals must occur. Same thing on distribution, right? The P holder also has the exclusive right to distribute their rendition of a performance. Same thing with display. Now display for a sound recording is gonna relate to the packaging, the artwork, et cetera. And oftentimes artwork on albums, such as it even exists anymore and doesn't really is licensed in from photographers or something. But they still, you know, you bundle this all together and there's a right of display. Then you have derivatives. Just like if I want to sample just the chorus of Dolly Parton's I Will Always Love You, her singing the song and I wanna put it into a song that I've written, I gotta get her approval and make a deal with her for that derivative work. Now, if I'm gonna use Arista's version, Whitney Houston song of, so it's Dolly's song sung by Whitney Houston that I wanna sample, I need Dolly's approval because I need the derivative for the C and then I need Arista Records derivative for the P. I need them both, right? Now I could say screw it, I don't wanna deal with Arista Records. I'll sing it myself, which would be a mistake. But then I would only need Dolly Parton's derivative license, right? Her license from her for the derivative works. But so far we're mirroring. We've got exclusive right for reproduction and distribution and display and derivatives on both sides, right? C side and the P side. Here's where things go off the rails. I know, yes, hand tight, buckle it. In the United States, in North Korea, in Iraq and in Syria, there is no enumerated right for public performance for the P, the sound recording. In every other industrialized country, they honor what is known as a neighboring right. So as I said, all of these are the rights. If you imagine a street and then on one side of the street, you have the C and on the other side, you have the P and you have reproduction, distribution, all those things, they neighbor each other like houses, right? There's no neighboring right in the States for right of public performance. So what that means, when Whitney's version of I Will Always Love You gets played on the radio and it does constantly or is broadcast on TV or what have you, Dolly gets paid because there is an enumerated right for public performance. And it's her C, her song for the composition. Whitney and Arista Records do not. No money is due to them because there's no enumerated right. In the rest of the world, except for North Korea, Iraq and Syria were in good company. Both parties get paid. So the label and the performer do because of this so-called neighboring right. But because the States doesn't do it, other countries justifiably go, why in the hell would we pay your writers if you're not gonna pay ours? So you have what is known in the industry and this wall kind of tied together here towards the end, black box money. And that is money that is collected by agencies that have either by government decree or remarket the right or the ability to act on behalf of songwriters and performers in some countries to issue licenses for public performance, collect the fees. They collect it, but because there's no reciprocal rights, no neighboring rights, they don't distribute it. So then it gets distributed out to guests. The biggest labels and publishers based on market share, whether or not they had anything to do with it. So in this, it just boils my blood to no degree. And we're not talking chump change here. It's just massive amounts of money that every year gets distributed out to the majors based on market share. That's not their money and they just keep doing it. So if you ever wonder why they're reluctant to change systems around this, there's your answer. Because in doing so, they would give up this bonus of songwriters money that doesn't get distributed either because of lack of neighboring rights, inefficient registration and tracking systems or whatever, money that's collected, not distributed, just gets distributed back to the majors over and over and over again. So why would you ever change it? It's just the gift that keeps giving. But so that anomaly in the States where there's no right of public performance between no neighboring right for the sound recording has caused just massive amounts of problems and hurt songwriters terribly. As part of the coverage reform of the late 90s, early 2000s, inclusive of what's known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the United States put in place a new right for the sound recording orders, the P-orders. So Whitney, Arista Records. This right grants them a right of public performance through digital transmission. So Pandora. When Pandora streams Whitney's version of I Will Always Love You, it kicks off a public performance royalty to Dolly as the sea holder, just in the way it would in any other capacity. But now Arista Records has paid 50% of a fee that is collected from Pandora. The performer, the featured performer, in this case, Whitney Houston gets 45% of that fee and then background performers or unions get the other 5%. So this is an attempt to try to remedy the issue of no neighboring rights. And over time, as we move to a completely digital society, this will obviate the terrestrial lack of right of public performance and composition. We're not nearly as close as you think we would be in 2019, do that happen? So those are the rights. Again, we'll put a resource out there so that you can see those. But again, I'm sort of building this Tetris Tower here to show you how challenging these elements with music copyright are. It's not as simple. I'm sure every lawyer out there who represents photographers are going, George, it's not simple there either. But from my estimation, it's not as simple as, oh, I'm going to take a picture and I've got the copyright to that and I can reproduce the true. But you got these two different rights in almost naturally many parties having to sort of coordinate mistakes are made. Agency issue comes into play. It's a challenge. Okay, so one of the things that we're going to work on in day two is the sort of challenges of joint works because it acts as sort of a microcosm of what I just described. Two writers come together to create a work. You have to delineate who owns what. Copyright must be transferred in a writing. You can't make an oral contract or enforceable oral contract for copyright. There has to be a writing to delineate it. It doesn't have to be 50-50. So if I write most of the song and Daza writes a little bit, maybe it's 80-20. However, absent a writing and a dispute, most of the time the courts will go, we're not going to deal with this just split it down the middle. So you want to delineate it. Of course, once you have more than one writer, all of the complexities with registration, getting paid, et cetera, multiple publishers, multiple labels increased by orders of magnitude or certainly, you know, sort of geometrically. So it is a very challenging dynamic. So we'll work through sort of joint works, the act of creation, the act of defining the contractual relationship between the two writers, how they're going to get paid to separate companies need to be set up, can it be done under one LLC? Lots of things to be considered there. Does it default to a partnership? And the real lawyer out there knows you don't want your business to default to partnerships, right? Unless there's an intent and limited liability partnership. So you got a whole can of worms once the joint work occurs. But it's relevant because so much. I mean, at Berkeley, I think it's probably an anomaly when someone does a work that's not a joint work or that doesn't include a sample or doesn't include some contribution from some other party. If you look at the credits on a Beyonce song, it's just dozens of people, right? So this is the reality of the music industry where lots of different rights holders all trying desperately to get paid to get credit in the systems are still archaic in nature. And so what's happening is the benefit just continues to accrue to the incumbents are like, well, look, it ain't broke for us even while the artists continue to struggle desperately and more than ever, right? I mean, there are people that are smarter than I that will disagree with this statement and that's fine. But this idea that the music industry is healthier in 2019 than it's ever been is insane. It's like the great science fiction writer, William Gibson says the future's already here, so it's not evenly distributed. And so yes, there is a lot of money being generated by streaming services, Spotify, Domino, but that money is going to a very, very, very, very small number of writers and labels. And so most artists are having a much harder time making any type of money from their work today than they were 10 years ago or 20 years ago. It's just true. And some of that is because there's a vast, there are vastly more of them, but a lot of it is because of the systems that are not in place to sort of accurately register. We still exist in what I call a model-based system rather than a measurement-based system. And that's very problematic in 2019 where we can map a genome. I remember and maybe this still happens in places where the electrical company would come out a couple of times a year, look at the little wheel and go, okay, well, here's what you use in this time. We're gonna estimate what it's gonna be. We're gonna model out what it is today. They know exactly how much energy you're using all the time and they charge you for it. The same could occur with the music business, but there are many that benefit from the modeling system and so they have no incentive to actually be more accurate or precise. So how do we address this? Well, these inefficiencies in the market are, to my mind, addressable. In addressing them, it would not only help artists to better sort of track, monetize their work. It would also help music users. Right now, if you're gonna open a restaurant and you wanna play music in it, you're really locked into a very specific system where you're gonna buy a license for public performance from ASCAP, BMI, CSAC, and that's gonna allow you to play all of the works in their catalog even if you don't want to. You're essentially paying for things that you will never use. And most likely, the works that you do play a lot of, if there anything outside of very mainstream works, those writers will never get fairly compensated. So it's a very, very bad system. And there are analogs, and I gave a talk at one of the OMI meetings about this in which we could open up the system to just create tremendous more wealth not only in efficiencies, not only for writers and artists, but for the labels and it's based on, my thesis is based on the Sabre Database for the Travel Agency, where there's a unified database that has all of the prices for all the different markets that all of the airlines, all the rental cars, all the hotels put their prices there. And then at the top of the stack are all of the various, the hip monks and the kayaks and the travel velocities that are built in user interfaces for customers, travelers to find better and more efficient ways to travel. The net effect of it is the travel industry continues to grow robustly. They get tremendous amounts of new information about where routes that they otherwise wouldn't have known or thought of. Actually, there's demand, new entrants, whether it's the Ryanair's or whatever can pop up and fill voids. So it's almost a straight line analog as to what I believe distributed ledger system could address for the music industry by looking at the Travel Agency. And I had the good fortune to meet one of the people that actually built the Sabre Database and he tends to agree. So don't take it from me, take it from him. So how do we get there? Well, this is where sort of distributed ledgers come into play. The blockchain was sort of developed as too strong but certainly utilized, popularized in order to keep track of Bitcoin transactions to make sure that not a single Bitcoin wasn't sort of fraudulently or otherwise transferred to more than one party. And to do it in a manner that was decentralized, it's important to remember that one of the main genesis of Bitcoin was as a byproduct of watching the 2007, 2008 financial collapse and this feeling that we really, really, really should not have all of our fortune tied to not just a country but to a bank. Like just by Bear Stearns going down that can send the shock waves that it did and that's too much of a consolidation of power. So whether Satoshi or whoever, the genius there was really let's try to decentralize, not have any one particular owner of the database. Let's also have an audit trail. And so the immutability element of blockchain is very important. A block on a blockchain can't go anywhere. You may or may not know who put it up there but it exists and then you can watch and see the others. So you do have an audit trail. And then of course, and this is the buzzword that everybody loves and infuriates lawyers. This idea, Nick Sanzpo really sort of popular as sort of the smart contract. And I prefer to think of a smart contract in the blockchain sense is not a legal construct but more of an if this, then that set of binary rules. If a certain set of criteria are met, another set of occurrences happen. So contracts require certain elements, consideration, capacity, bargain for exchange that a smart contract just code. It's, can it be a binding contract? Maybe I don't know if it's been tested but what I'm looking for more is to have it be viewed as a set of business than that rules. Those are really the elements that need to be understood if you're gonna sort of try to work with blockchain and then hopefully you can see how that might relate to the music business. If we have a database that's not owned or siloed off by one party but rather can be explored or found or searched by anyone who wants and that on that database is a set of immutable records that actually show who the true owner is. And then you can set a set of rules on the asset itself that says, okay, if this set of criteria are met then a license will occur and then we'll keep track of that license through another block. There's the music business for you, right? The problem with it and the lack of adoption for it amongst incumbents is that they feel wrongly that it would disintermediate them into oblivion. They've always thought this. They've thought this since the piano roll, the cassette, vinyl CDs, downloads, they've always thought that any new technology is going to disintermediate makes them irrelevant. They're wrong, they should be embracing this in the same way they should have embraced the download and the CD and everything else. They won't and that has more to do with sort of an innovators dilemma problem in mindset than it does to necessarily sort of bad faith but there is an element of bad faith as well in my opinion. So in any case, so you have this blockchain decentralized database and this ledger can address the challenges that I've talked about. There are concerns that need to be thought through as we work on the project on day two. The first goes back to understanding copyright and hopefully I've given at least enough of an overview that we can have an intelligent conversation about the different rights holders. Many blockchain music startups have failed because they haven't understood that and or they've gotten a set of songs that have multiple owners and they just can't find the rights to holders or they didn't even know they needed to get the rights so they get sued into oblivion rate. So it's very important that we're conscious of the different rights holders. So we're gonna set this experiment up in a way so that we know who those are. The second thing that we have to be really careful of is that the blockchain technology is evolving quickly but we all know that it's not energy efficient for the most part. It takes a lot of time, a lot of electrical power to actually write to a blockchain. There are certainly technological Moore's law things that are happening that's gonna obviate that but it ain't easy. And then also smart contracts are as I described them they're not terribly nuanced. They do very well with sort of very binary if this than that actions that's why they're so great with supply chain. They don't do great if they're nuanced if it's okay if this and then this and then also this and then this then that they break. And so again, this will eventually be solved but it hasn't been so I think we need to calibrate expectations around the current state of the art with blockchain tech as it relates to music. So to kind of sum up, gotta understand that the two copyrights that sort of immediately occur with the song understand the different rights that each party has understanding that the licensing of the works in accordance with those rights is part of the United States copyright code where you can't kind of can't get around it understanding that certain of the licenses are what's known as compulsory. So in other words, the government has set a rate and a set of standards. So if I want to do a rendition cover of someone's song that artist probably cannot stop me but I must agree to the compulsory license to pay them a certain rate. Other licenses and one that we'll focus on is called a synchronization license, which is when a song is synchronized with a piece of music, I'm sorry, a moving image of film TV. There's no compulsory license for those. Those are negotiated licenses, derivative samples. There's no compulsory there. We can make the argument that maybe there should be, I would make the argument that if we're able to get a good technical solution through blockchain, you won't need a compulsory license. We could finally move to a world in which the free market would dictate how much songs are worth and to the marketplace. We know now, we don't know what the fair cost of music is today because of these compulsory licenses. All we know is that it's not fair, right? So unless and until we move to a more sort of invisible hand marketplace where artists can set their rate and adjust it based on demand and set rules around it. I mean, one of the frustrations that we see so much in political times is artists having their songs used in political campaigns by parties that take or politicians they don't support and the laws make it almost impossible for them to have any remedy to stop them because of the blanket licenses of public performance. So all of these things could be addressed with technology that exists even in its nascent form. There are reasons, again, dominoes and individual animal reasons but some bad acting too that's keeping that from happening. But I hope to use this day to sort of further emphasize these points through some experimentation and some building of things. So that's the plan. Wow, that was outstanding. Thank you for taking the time to walk us through some of the underbrush in a sense of the different nuances and facets of the rights holders and the sources of law and copyright and then the specific rights and sometimes non-corresponding that apply. And so looking forward, as you said, we definitely will put this video on one of our learning pages and we'll link to some of the relevant materials that you said on the day itself, it'll be somewhat emerging for sure but it does sound like we have a going plan to do a deeper focus on perhaps the sync rights and multiple composer rights. Is there anything that students that'll be joining us and others in the big wide world might want to know about how to construct an inappropriate co-author agreement? And do you have any advice on things like, you brought up the legal entity that you might want to perhaps now we'll see? Yeah, yeah, we can talk about all that. I mean, look, an agreement between two writers is like an agreement between two parties with anything else or you would need to define what percentage of the copyright. And again, we're talking dominantly probably about the composition side so if we make an actual sound recording of this, then we would want, which we will, then without a label, then those parties are gonna like who gets the rights there. So you'd have to define what the assets are, right? The copyright to the composition, the copyright to the sound recording, which party owns, which percentage of that? You know, maybe it's 50%, maybe it's not. Then as you say, you're gonna need some sort of fictitious business entity because you don't want to do this as a partnership because whose social security number would you use, right? I mean, then someone's gonna, you know, so you would, my advice would be an LLC. You set up a simple LLC and was a very simple sort of operating agreement that delineates out, you know, where the different percentages payouts, those types of things. And then you could copyright the work under the LLC too. So the LLC would be the copyright holder and then the payment would come into the LLC and you divide it out as dividends or whatever. But I mean, that may be too deep of a dive but there are structures for that. And then to your point about synchronization, you know, we will then look at how smart contract technology could obviate some of the issues with, you know, errors, omissions, bad actors with the division of money as it comes in. It should be able to be divided right as source through a smart contract. And then because I wanted to talk about SYNC because there is no compulsory license so we can then think about, well, you know, are you okay having one set price for this song? I mean, what if Spielberg wants it for his movie versus some student filmmaker who doesn't have a budget? It's gonna be the same price for both. You know, so we can talk about different granularities based on use. Or you may say, look, I'm not comfortable having my song used in a, you know, a film with content that, you know, whatever it may be. So we could talk about that with regards to SYNC and talk about whether or not smart contracts can address this at this point. I can't, but we can at least explore that. Okay, outstanding. All right, George. Well, thank you for taking the time to lay this out. We'll distribute it to all the students in the class later today. And then Mila and Brian and some of the other core team and I will work with you over the coming days to fill out the references page. So again, for folks that want to track and follow this you can find more at long.mit.edu forward slash learning. And for those of you in the class, the day two again is January 16th, Wednesday at the MIT Media Lab. So if you're, if you want to show up, please do register at that site first so that we can accommodate you. Okay, so with all that said, thanks again, George. And really looking forward to co-teaching this with you. You're the best. Thanks, guys. Take care.