Why Digital Property Rights Matter

And how they can be better in a web3 future

Dec 22, 2022

👋 Welcome to the 39th issue of The Syllabus from Invisible College—a newsletter that helps you navigate the fast-moving world of web3. To get it delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe here:

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We're excited to be dishing out 10 amazing prizes for our event POAP earners:

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Check out the lore page on our website to see what the different NFT types look like.

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Now onto this week’s post…

In my last piece, I wrote a line about how we might want to live “in a more decentralized online future where there are digital property rights for everyone.”

It’s a bold and idealistic line. Yet the more I thought about it, the less deeply I truly understood the second part of the line. Sure, “digital property rights for everyone” sounds good and it feels correct. But what exactly are digital property rights? Why do they matter? And what do they mean within the context of a more decentralized web3 future?

You don’t own most of your digital products (yet)

When you lease a new car, you know if you don’t make your payments the car will eventually get repossessed. So while it might feel like you own the car, you don’t really. The same goes for digital subscriptions like Netflix or Spotify. If you don’t pay the monthly fee, you lose access to those services.

But what if you buy a digital product?

Maybe you purchase a movie from Amazon, a song from iTunes, or a software tool like the music production application Ableton. In each of those cases, you don’t actually own them. What you’re really purchasing is a license to access them. A license that is revocable by the centralized company at any time or could be lost forever if your account is deleted.

“Buying” digital products is misleading.

Similarly, social media platforms allow you to borrow the right to use your account in exchange for collecting your data and selling it to advertisers. Unless you break their rules and they revoke your rights. The recent Twitter Files stories, although they’re seemingly quite biased, have illustrated how centralized content enforcement is a messy, fraught process that can leave some people feeling unfairly treated. But any arguments that claim the decisions made by Twitter were an affront to free speech don’t hold water because Twitter owns their user’s accounts and can do whatever they want as long as it’s within their agreed-upon terms and conditions.

When you actually own things, whether physical or digital, you can transfer ownership.

If I own my car, I can sell it to whomever I want and for whatever price I want. I could even give it away to my stepdaughter for her 16th birthday. Best of luck to her on that front.

That’s not possible for digital products in a web2 world.

I can’t sell you the movie I bought on Amazon. I could give you my login, of course, but then I run the risk of Amazon finding out and canceling my account. Then neither of us gets to watch Elf this holiday season.

Domain names are one of the few digital products you can legitimately and legally own. You could also self-host an email with the same domain name, so you fully own that email address, as well. But good luck getting through the spam filters at Google, et al.

Web3 can fix this

The core premise of web3 revolves around ownership of digital assets. To be even more precise, it’s about provable and transparent ownership of those assets.

One of the most common arguments from web3 skeptics is that everything on a blockchain could just be in a server database instead. But an important feature of the blockchain is that the data it stores is immutable and can be seen by anyone. This means you can prove ownership and you can transfer that ownership to someone else through a secondary marketplace or by a direct wallet-to-wallet transfer.

As I pointed out in the previous section, you don’t own the song you buy off iTunes or you stream on Spotify. Buying a music NFT, on the other hand, allows you to own the digital representation of the song, sort of like a deed to the song. And because you own it, you can sell it or trade it whenever you want.

In a recent NFT drop on OpenSea, musicians omgkirby and Channel Tres sold a collection of 5,550 pieces of animated art (pictured above), each with a unique song tied to it. Every NFT came “with complete publishing and masters rights for the associated song.” This included uploading it to Spotify and the like, using it within your own content such as a podcast intro, or anything else you could dream up. This is simply unheard of in the web2 world—unless you happen to own a record label.

Lens is a decentralized social media profile protocol being built by the Aave team. As they put it:

With Lens Protocol, you are in control. You own your profile, where you use it, how you use it, and even how you monetize it. That means you have the power over your content, and it’s all right there, as an NFT, in your wallet. It’s not just easy. It’s how digital identity should be: yours.

Their copywriting team really knows how to tug at a decentralization maximalist’s heartstrings.

There are already several apps that integrate with Lens:

Lenster: A social media web app

Lenstube: A video-sharing social platform

Stems: A music collaboration app with social features powered by Lens

Talently: On-chain resumes that display your social following from Lens

You can follow me on Lenster here. But if you use the phaver app, which also integrates with Lens, you could follow me there instead and my updated following will be reflected in both apps—and any other app that uses Lens that I might sign up for in the future. This gives me more ownership over my social profile and I can take it wherever I want. If I don’t like the design of an app, I can easily connect to a different one I like better.

Decentralized social media is in its infancy right now. The Aave team is rolling it out slowly, and thoughtfully, in limited beta releases. Yet, I bet you can easily imagine a future with more options and ownership, without your data being sold to the highest bidder.

Digital property rights protect creators too

For online creators, cultivating an owned audience is important. This most typically means building an email list.

Astute readers have probably noticed the hypocrisy of writing a piece about this topic on Substack, a centralized publishing platform.

Couldn’t Substack decide to close up shop and take our email list with them? Yes, they could, although they’ve explicitly said in their terms that writers own their lists and can export them at will. There’s definitely a trust risk there, though.

We could move our newsletter to Mirror, a web3 publishing platform. But we’ve decided to use Substack because at the time Mirror didn’t have built-in email collecting. And Substack’s powerful network of writers and their recommendation engine are worth the trade-off, in our opinion.

For more well-known creators, web3 digital property rights can help prevent unauthorized duplication and distribution of their work, something that is incredibly hard to track and enforce in web2.

As a creator myself, I’m excited to see where this all leads.

There’s A LOT left to build

As with most things in web3, we’re still very early. There are many more tools and protocols and apps that need to be built. And once they’re built, they need to grow.

If hardly anybody watches videos on Lenstube, then it’ll be difficult to get creators to leave YouTube or TikTok. These web3 platforms don’t just want to be a safe haven for people who were de-platformed somewhere else or banned for selling illegal items. It’ll take some breakout successes or vastly improved user experiences for people to notice.

If we want to live, as I wrote last week, “in a more decentralized online future where there are digital property rights for everyone”, there’s still a lot of work left to be done.

The Syllabus