Videos

Just FYI, it's a fun mental exercise to dream up I suppose. I don't have all the answers and if it were easy it'd already exist.

You have to subscribe to the host. Your token gives them legal authority to get it and stream to you. In the original example, you can buy from anyone, and the token is auth'd by warner brothers and ultimately they got paid for it. In theory, the original distributor auths the token and gets money for their product directly from consumers instead of via corporate license or profit share. The difference is, any host would have legal authority to stream it and in theory they could get it from any other host in the network at that point, not just the original distributor, because you have a valid ownership token. This means they cannot cancel on you or force you to move hosts, like they can today. And again, it requires both a tech and legal framework to work, but it is fundamentally different than anything that exists today. You'd be legally free to cache a copy if you want, since you own it, or just cache it from your subscribed streaming host. Nobody should care how you get it, just that you are allowed to have it and you paid for it and you pay for streaming service if you want to stream. The service itself should be vastly cheaper, because they don't have a large media cost, just network and storage costs. The host network would likely have to run on some version of torrent with chain Auth integration. The original distributor can't be the final arbiter of ownership nor the only host or expected to host forever, as they could dissolve and media could end up in limbo. Again, every detail isn't needed, we're not solving this over night, but a distributed ledger of ownership is step 1 of how you buy something and have everyone have even a chance of knowing you own it without both a central authority and the ability for them to unilaterally take it away. This could apply to your copy of Robocop and your stock in Amazon.