Transaction Models
Transaction Models hold the promise for content to keep moving through the internet as it does naturally, while making it easier for news publishers and content creators to receive royalties from secondary or even tertiary use of their content.
Our transaction models will serve to explore the possibilities to create a more automated, consistent, and robust ecosystem. By utilizing blockchain-based smart contracts we are prototyping and testing innovative ecosystem-wide, end-to-end processes.
How it works
Transaction Models are the communication protocols and process definitions which are needed to support community-wide interoperability. They are the language that enable computers to find consensus about specific sets of behaviors throughout the ecosystem.
For example in a token-based model, rights owners could generate license tokens with specific use rights and transact them like a currency. Trading partners would acquire those tokens and transfer them to their customers. Usage rights for specific content assets would be linked pseudonymously to individual users by unforgeable transactions of those tokens that are recorded on a blockchain. This would enable third-party systems (for example a content delivery system) to independently validate usage rights without the need to manage user accounts.
While a simple token-based model would generally allow users to “resell” their usage rights, it could not easily enforce an automated royalty distribution or other business rules. This is where smart contracts have great potential that we will explore with our transaction models.
