Decentralised Media Licensing

Steps to complete:

1. Choose your starting point: You can start with either the challenge or the media.
2. Describe your media asset: The more specific the media description, the better (e.g., "music album covers" rather than just "images"). Describe the constituent parts of the asset e.g. if your asset is a short animation, is it the finished rendered animation only, or are assets such as the 3D models and soundtrack included?
3. Consider your challenges: What are your most problematic challenges? What do you want to address? Consider both creation and distribution challenges. Here are some examples to get you thinking:
   • You're a content creator and sharing content on social media is how you make money but you want to stop others from taking and posting your content as their own.
   • You have created a deepfake of yourself and you want to limit how companies can license and use it.
   • You wish to license a stem from a music track as part of a new remix, but there are multiple rights holders to seek permission from.
4. Summarise: Capture your starting point - asset, challenge or both - on one sticky-note to take forwards.

Steps to complete:

1. Work in your team or individually: Place your 'asset' in the centre of Activity 2 sheet, and complete the sheet using the provided prompts (not all prompts may be applicable to your media).
2. Partner Discussion: For 5 minutes, find another team or individual to exchange ideas with and use Activity 2 sheet to briefly introduce your media and challenge.

Consider:

• Who creates this media?
• What tools and materials are involved?
• What is the typical workflow?
• Who are the stakeholders in the creation process?

Steps to complete:

1. Reflect on Creation: Reflect on Creation: Consider how your media is created and complete Activity 3 sheet using relevant information from the prompts. Examples of possible data for your manifest:
   • Materials used
   • GPS Coordinates
   • Software required for interaction
   • Title of work
   • ID of software/hardware used
   • Timestamp
   • Date of author's death
   • Filters applied

Remember:

• The manifest captures provenance—where did this media come from?
• You can also consider the media content, for example, subjects in an image, or identities of voices in an audio recording
• Think about what information would be valuable for future users or re-users
• This data cannot be easily stripped or removed from the file, consider if any of this information could become problematic in the future

Steps to complete:

1. Re-use practices: Imagine what do you want others to do with your media, or specific practices you wish to discourage or limit.
2. Conditions of use: In what conditions you would you like to people to use your media? Are there limits on the type of uses you would like to encourage? For example:
   • Would you like to encourage more remix, but want to limit the use of this to specific types of use, i.e. educational, non-commercial
   • Would like to encourage reuse but have a time restriction in place to create a buzz → 'must be used by'
   • Would like to encourage engagement but embed geographical restrictions → 'only used in UK'
   • You want to be paid a revenue for commercial use and define payment for each time your asset appears as part of a social media feed.
3. Create licence tokens: Reflect on your answers to questions 1 and 2 and consider how they can be formalised as rules and clauses. E.g. create restrictions like a time limit or "UK only". Record these as licence tokens on sticky notes and stack them in the centre of Activity sheet 4. These inform the next part of the workshop.

Key Considerations:

• License tokens are programmable and machine-readable
• They can represent very specific, bespoke licensing arrangements
• Think about both what you want to enable and what you want to restrict
• Consider how tokens might represent royalties or other forms of value exchange

Steps to complete:

1. Find a partner reflect on how you could reuse each other's media based on the current licence tokens.
2. Take your partners asset and place them in the centre of your Activity sheet 5. Follow and complete the prompts in the reuse context to consider:
   • Who might want to reuse this media?
   • How might they want to transform or adapt it?
   • What value could reuse create?
   • What concerns exist around unauthorizsed reuse?
3. Take the tokens from your partners Activity sheet 4 that allow you to reuse that media and place this below their media asset.

Reuse Examples:

• Remixing music tracks into new compositions
• Incorporating images into larger artworks
• Sampling video clips for educational content
• Translating or adapting written works

Steps to complete:

1. Continuing to work with the reuse of your partner's asset, take your partners' manifest file (Activity sheet 3 and 6) to add new provenance data.
2. Follow prompts on the Activity 6 section to consider what could now be included in a manifest for the reused media:
   • Original source attribution
   • License acquired
   • Modifications made
   • New creation metadata
   • Issue New Licenses: Consider any new licence tokens that could be issued to support subsequent reuse and engagement.

Key Concepts:

• Each reuse creates a new layer of provenance data
• The manifest tracks the complete lineage of the media
• New license tokens can build upon or modify existing licenses
• Attribution is preserved through the entire chain

Steps to Complete:

1. Take your partners Activity sheet 4, and fill in Activity 7 using the prompts to consider re-use practices and permissions.
2. Create new licence tokens for your re-use media asset.

Reflection:

Steps to Complete:

1. Working independently now, place your media asset in the centre of Activity 8 sheet. Complete using the provided prompts (not all prompts may be applicable to your media). Consider engagement scenarios:
   • Who would wish to experience this media and how?
   • How do they discover and access the media?
   • What value does that engagement offer?
   • How might engagement data feed back to creators?

Engagement vs. Reuse:

• Engagement is about consumption and experience, not creation
• Consider passive engagement (viewing, listening) and active engagement (sharing, commenting)
• Think about how decentralised licensing might enable new forms of engagement

Steps to Complete:

1. Form groups: On your table in groups of 4 or 6, arrange your individual Activity sheets to tell your complete story.
2. Walkthrough your use case: Each person in the group uses their Activity sheets to walkthrough and reflect on their use case with the others in the group.
   • Try to tell a story of media creation, reuse and engagement
   • Reflect on how decentralised licensing may (or may not) address your challenge
   • Identify opportunities for unexpected value creation
   • As a group, help critique and improve each use case

Critical Reflection:

• Consider technical, social, and legal implications
• Reflect on how decentralised licensing extends, contradicts or relies upon existing means of rights management.