David Schwartz expressed: Some things of value are (ideally) completely fungible like money, cryptocurrencies, and gold. Some are completely non-fungible like collectibles and houses. But there are also a lot of things that live in a semi-fungible middle like concert tickets and airplane tickets.
Blockchains started out with completely fungible assets and are now moving to cover non-fungible assets. But there’s a huge market for assets in the squishy middle that is very poorly-served today. That is the market for digital rights.
Digital rights are rights to access particular content through some service that provides the content when needed. They include video games on services like Steam, books on systems like Kindle, and movies you’ve purchased on services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime.
These are very badly handled today. Your rights are spread out over many services. And each right is tied to a particular service such that abandoning that service means abandoning that right. This isn’t good for anyone.
It sucks for customers because if I decide to stop paying for Hulu, I lose all the movies I bought. Hulu might stop working with the devices I want to use it with or raise their rates, and they hold some of my rights captive.
It sucks for rights sellers too. If you have a hit movie, you have a window to get $21 for it when it’s hot. But if buyers worry, they’ll switch streaming services before they want to see it again in a few years, they’ll rent it instead. You lose the premium sales.
Markets that bring buyers and sellers together that aren’t built for the convenience of either the buyers or the sellers are ripe for disruption. This may be a big part of the future of public blockchains as the digital rights market is massive and massively broken.
Community Response: I follow what you are saying. Example: We are building an Online Social Club Platform for our NFT’s, but since we don’t own the NFT’s after they are sold. Nothing is stopping XRP Junkies NFT’s from being used on another platform. It also works the other way too.
We can take another projects NFT and use it in our Online Social Club Platform. This is a win-win for both parties.
How can one take advantage of the opportunity? I’m assuming the digital rights will have to be in the form of NFTs, or something. If I Buy a movie from Amazon. Isn’t the danger for Amazon that I will make copies and give it to all my friends. How can that be solved?
Yes, the rights themselves would essentially be an NFT. Rights to IP that are stored on the blockchain would then be transferable to another party, using some tokenized form of permission-giving smart contract.
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