Digging a little deeper into some previous ideas.
After initially releasing various cool tunes as NFTs on vinyl last year, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to best represent full rights ownership of a record as an NFT. We have seen a lot of hype in the NFT scene since then, a lot of exciting things and also a lot of absolute trash. So now it seems that the dust has settled on the hype, let’s focus on a cool little idea which I never fully got around to implementing, but have had further time to ruminate on.
Back in October I had the idea to create two NFTs to represent music ownership. One is the master NFT (mNFT) which represents full ownership of all rights of the song. The other is the child NFT (cNFT) this represents a copy of the song/record (think of it as a CD in a music store, remember those).
So the owner of the mNFT has all legal rights to the underlying music, we can add an advanced digital signature and contract to ensure that if the art was reproduced without consent then legal action could be taken. Having an NFT in your wallet which says you own the full rights gives you absolutely no real legal ownership nor proof in case of litigation.
For the sake of this proof of concept, we are presuming there is no other way to get the content (in real life we know one could torrent a track or find another way of ripping it).
Mint an ERC-721 which represents full ownership and rights of the music on an EP called ‘Discordant Cries’. Make it clear simply transferring the NFT from wallet A to B implies absolutely no change of ownership nor change in rights ownership. We store the rights in the NFT data, we also store the contributors and their % of royalties from each sale.
Mint a second ERC-721 which stores the data of a digital advanced signature which legally signs over the ownership. Use the 0xmons multi-asset bundler to bundle the legal ‘proof’ into the mNFT, think of it as an attached legal contract. For those not familiar with digital advanced signatures, many countries now use their own digital identity cards to digitally sign, in Estonia we sign contracts for rentals and basically for everything using our ID cards, and these digital signatures are legally binding. These signatures are becoming more and more popular and are being rolled with identify card schemes across Europe and further afield.
Mint an ERC-1155 which represents the cNFT. Let’s assume we are releasing an EP called ‘Discordant Cries’, it is physically redeemable on vinyl, we pressed 250 at the factory, so we will do a 250 mint of this cNFT. Each cNFT symbolises one vinyl copy of Discordant Cries. We will not store the music file in the NFT data/IPFS/Arweave.
Bits being worked on:
Creating a smart contract which does all of the above using a web3 wallet and triggers you to sign the contract using your eID card (Sinelock).
Extend royalties and fair share of sales by setting up contributor/investor percentages in the mNFT. Deploy a smart contract which queries the mNFT data of those percentages and then sends them to appropriate wallets when cNFTs are sold (so the mastering engineer will get 4%, violinist 6%, investor 50% etc).
Appropriate way to declare that a change in ownership of full rights.
Take care.
Simon
