Below is a lengthy post I wrote on X after reading stuff about Story Protocol.
Click here for the original post.
The post got a response from one of the co-founders, which you can read here.
Hope you enjoy.
After reading through research and comments on @StoryProtocol, my initial reaction is
why would anyone use this
I think the dispute aspect has been the greatest concern when it comes to copyright and IP. If you want to protect someone's property, you need to know that property belongs to who.
But how do you know if something belongs to someone if that something is not tangible, yet only told by stories?
Fundamentally there is no reason that anyone should trust the "dispute module" that Story Protocol proposes because the process will become an endless, pedantic argument between random nobodies when it is a totally open forum, or an institution making arbitrary decisions, which doesn’t really solve anything and has no right to decide what belongs to who anyways.
Let's say I recorded a sound of a drum set. A kick, snare, cymbal, hi-hat, crash, cowbell, etc. Then I create a machine that can play these sounds when I press buttons.
Assume like millions of people use this thing that I named as a "drum machine", eventually creating a unique niche of music out of it. I mean, like assume there are festivals, forums, a global community created due to this drum machine I invented.
Now comes me, who actually was the reason behind all the drum sounds, demanding money from all the people who created music out of my drum machine. Some might say, "Hey this dude who created the unique sound of the drum machine should take credit!"
On the other side there are people yelling "NO it's the creatives who used the drum machine to produce great music that should take more credit". But again, the guy who sold the drum set that I used to record all the sounds is now telling me that he actually owns everything.
What if God came down and said he owns all the frequencies that were made by these drums?
Who are you going to side with?
Essentially everything will boil down to the ability to formulate bullshit stories to convince whoever decides the outcome of these disputes.
Will they have a full-on jury trial to find out if a snare drum sound belongs to HumpLord42069 or RizzKing911? Who will represent them? DJ Khaled?
Story time.
In 1997, English rock band The Verve lost a legal battle, being ruled that their mega hit Bittersweet Symphony plagiarized The Rolling Stones 1965 song, The Last Time.
The Verve lost 100% of rights to their song, and Mick Jagger and Keith Richards from The Rolling Stones were given full songwriting credits despite not contributing to the creation of the song itself.
Now go listen to the two songs and tell me if that was a good call.
Links here:
Bittersweet Symphony: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lyu1KKwC74
The Last Time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdFQtbXAWdc
You would imagine, “Why did they even lose??”
Because The Verve actually negotiated a license to use a five-note segment of an orchestral recording of a cover of a Rolling Stones song.
You don’t get it right?
Just listen to the song they sampled: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YrllfAMwHI
This song is supposed to be a cover of The Rolling Stones, which The Verve sampled.
So basically The Verve got sued because they actually had rights to sample a song that The Rolling Stones doesn’t even own. LOL
Do you think any of these songs actually sound like each other?
This case basically told the world that “Hey this chord progression and all melodies that can be possibly deviated from the composition is owned by The Rolling Stones!”
Do you believe that is the case?
It will be impossible to distinguish the owner of a sound, a style, a look, and even a story through Story Protocol.
The above image was famously known as “Pocahontas In Space” because when you substitute some details, the plot for Avatar becomes Pocahontas.
Does Disney has the right to sue James Cameron for such blatant plagiarism?
Now what about Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Harry Potter, Lion King? They all use The Hero’s Journey formula.
Are these movies all rip offs of each other?
But ultimately, who owns this formula? If nobody does, can I mint an NFT on the Story Protocol to be the first and go out sue everyone?
Again, it depends on the ability to bullshit your way to make people believe something. Meaning you can own anything, while owning nothing.
if the dispute process can’t be 100% accurate and 100% reliable, there is no point of creating another system that will produce arbitrary outcomes
And I believe there will never be a system that can have 100% accuracy because all content is consumed by the individual.
Let’s say I sing a cover song of Radiohead so well, that some people will listen to my cover of Radiohead only.
How much did Radiohead contribute to make people listen to my cover? If I am the sole reason, does that grant me a part of the IP? Or simply because the song was written by Radiohead they take 100% rights?
Even though I didn’t write the song, I produced the sound waves of the song, which are the actual physical medium that reached the listener’s ear drums, so wouldn’t it make sense to say that I contributed more than Radiohead in this narrow instance?
The thing is, I can make up these type of claims, and nobody will be able to decide if it is sound logic or not because it just depends on what people feel.
Meaning logic stands nowhere in the process of disputing whatever IP belongs to who. It’s just all feelings.
Eventually, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones returned the rights to Bitter Sweet Symphony to The Verve's Richard Ashcroft in 2019.
The base assumption of Story Protocol to operate is to trust the protocol’s consensus as the source of truth. But what is the truth? Nobody really knows.
