Transcopyright Engine… maybe time is finally here

I have worked in music copyright for over 25 years and I was recently reminded about an old paper from Ted Nelson on his idea for a Transcopyright Engine. Essentially it says that there would only ever be one copy of any copyright work and people would have a licence to access that copy. Given this was proposed about 20 years ago it was purely conceptual, or should have been but there’s a tale, perhaps apocryphal, that he blew huge amounts of money on the first 5Gb drive thinking this would solve the storage problems. As we know, Mr Nelson can be a bit flaky at times as many smart folk are, but I just looked this up and it’s still going as part of his Xanadu project and more interestingly he has brought Lessig into the frame to learn from Creative Commons. There’s a summary of it at http://transcopyright.org/. Given the ongoing push to the edge of network and network computers perhaps Ted was right?

Sadly my own project (for a Licensed Copyright mark that would be an active identifier, such as DOI, back to a contract licence database) that I kicked off for the UK record industry did not get moving which is a real shame. Creative commons is great for giving away for free but the problem with copyright is not the law, it’s communicating with the copyright owner (my mantra I know). Piracy of the future will be breach of licence rather than no licence at all so if the industry can’t even manage things just now then it will only get worse.