Just woke up, guess I don’t need a coffee!
I feel like you just wrote the pitch for Story by describing all these problems in IP.
First off, thanks for checking this out. I’m extremely grateful when people deep dive into our docs and point out questions or concerns they have. JS Mill is my favorite philosopher and his best quote is that truths without any challenge are dead dogmas, and we have too many dead dogmas in crypto. Criticism is what turns dead dogmas into living truths. So let me try to share this living truth.
Warning: this will be quite a long answer, as you raised a lot of valid points, and I want to make sure I am thorough. Too much handwaving happens on X, unfortunately this isn’t the best medium, but let’s try.
The problems you are pointing out are EXTREMELY VALID! So valid, in fact, this is why we started Story. IP simply does NOT work for the creator, it biases towards companies with massive legal teams that essentially overwhelm small players. This is exactly why we thought the neutrality of blockchain would be a perfect antidote. So I appreciate these problems you’re raising and we think about them constantly.
“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.” I have to be honest - if every innovator accepted this, there would be no innovation, no creativity, ever. Every entrepreneur understands that risk and failure are the fertile soil of future success. Even rockets which absolutely need to be 110% reliable exploded many times before they worked. Bitcoin with PoW and Ethereum with PoS are not “100% secure and 100% reliable”, and IP is a much more difficult problem than money with regards to consensus. This is the wrong expectation to bring into a critique of any project, but I will address all your points in good faith as I believe your critique is very much in good faith as well.
The next few topics:
- Bitcoin/Ethereum vs Story, Programmatic vs Intersubjective Consensus
- Money’s Intersubjectivity Problems vs IP’s Intersubjectivity Problems
- Responding to your specific points
- How the Dispute Module actually works, misconceptions, areas for improvement
1. Bitcoin/Ethereum vs Story, Programmatic vs Intersubjective Consensus
The entire crux of your concern boils down to a CONSENSUS PROBLEM. Indeed, MONEY and BLOCKCHAINS and OUR ENTIRE SPACE runs on solving CONSENSUS PROBLEMS: technical consensus, economic consensus, and social consensus.
Imagine someone reads Satoshi’s whitepaper in 2008 and says: this will never work! Money has been about violence since the days of seashells, lenders in Venice regularly charged absurd interest rates, even fiat today sits astride the decisions of Jerome Powell and a single interest rate. Moreover, fraud is rampant on both the merchant and the buyer side, and requires people to tell their BS stories on both sides and for a single arbitrator to choose. No one will ever want to use Bitcoin, it’s a miracle that the government has wrangled in the financial system at all via guns and violence!
This is how it feels to read your critique, to be completely honest. You basically wrote our pitch. These are the exact problems that Bitcoin (and all later blockchains focused on programmable, global, immutable money) STARTED to solve. And the way we solve them is CONSENSUS, either PoW or PoS.
2. Money’s Intersubjectivity Problems vs IP’s Intersubjectivity Problems
Similarly, Story is starting in a world where the legal system is not only intersubjective, but also messy and dangerous for individual creators, with a bias towards the big actors who can wield the law as a weapon. The way Story aims to solve this is CONSENSUS via our Proof of Creativity protocol (ofc our L1 runs on PoS). However, this consensus is an INTERSUBJECTIVE CONSENSUS, not a PROGRAMMATIC CONSENSUS with programmatic slashing like Ethereum PoS.
Even money itself suffers from intersubjective consensus, eg payment fraud. How do you determine who is right or wrong between the merchant and the buyer? Both will make up stories to be right. These are live problems, but I don’t see people critiquing the idea that stablecoins can eventually replace payment rails around the world.
It is true that IP is almost entirely an intersubjective consensus problem, which does indeed make it more difficult. That is why from a historical perspective Bitcoin and Ethereum had to come first, and we’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t, and as Story evolves and faces challenges, we will continue to learn.
3. Responding to your specific points
On the messiness of deliberation: “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.” I share your concerns around the size of the problem, but I am not as pessimistic as you. This describes every city council, every constitutional convention, and god knows, every single DAO. Yet over time, this is how innovation happens, often not with a strike of genius but through the long and unsexy trial and error process. Further, as I will cover later, the dispute module creates a MARKETPLACE OF TRUST, and people can opt into dispute mechanisms that don’t involve any deliberation at all, but rather rely on voting or economic staking.
On the post facto nature of the current legal system, and how Story makes it pre facto: “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.” Your example around the drum sound perfectly encapsulates the issues with the current system. Give the current IP system, which makes registration and monetization difficult, disputes are handled POST FACTO. Artists don’t register their work because it’s too difficult, and as a result, others who use that IP don’t know what the terms are around it. BECAUSE of the problems with the current IP system, we get the situations you just pointed out. Story is making it extremely seamless for creators to register IP, and for anyone in the world to see their terms programmatically, making the legal system more efficient and just by making everything explicit and pre facto so that these problems never occur. Prevention is more valuable than a cure.
On pricing IP: “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?” Again, this is an exact pitch for why Story is important. So much of the legal system is POST FACTO. On Story, Radiohead or any creator can explicitly program and set the cost/royalties/terms of using their IP, and others can take it or leave it. This is all on chain. So now, others can easily see what it costs to use IP. And if they steal it, Radiohead can point to onchain history. On what happens when people wrongly claim onchain history, I will discuss that in the dispute module overview.
On the continued aversion to deliberation as an information aggregation mechanism, and the familiar descent into relativism: “Essentially everything will boil down to the ability to formulate bullshit stories to convince whoever decides the outcome of these disputes.” “It will be impossible to distinguish the owner of a sound, a style, a look, and even a story through Story Protocol.” “Will they have a full-on jury trial to find out if a snare drum sound belongs to HumpLord42069 or RizzKing911?” Great names btw, these names are IP. Again, deliberation is only one of many ways of aggregating preferences, in fact the most susceptible to BS. Story’s dispute module has other options. Also, I think it’s a bit cynical to point at everything subjective as necessarily a “bullshit story”. Just because there is room for interpretation doesn’t mean we need to take the slippery slope down to relativism. Plato famously defined humans as featherless bipeds, and the legend goes that Diogenes plucked a chicken off its feathers and said “Behold, a man!“. Just because we struggle to explicitly define things does not mean we can’t do it in practice. Even Plato struggles sometimes :)
On the potential concern that no one will ever actually pay up: Also, I’d like to point at that MANY businesses have already cracked the dispute resolution problem, albeit in a smaller scale with a single closed/permissioned platform in a single medium. I could easily right click save as Getty images, but I don’t. The NYT chooses to pay for it even though they could rip it off. Why? Because it is easier to do that than to get sued, and also reputation matters. There are already billion dollar businesses like Getty built off of licensing IP online, despite all the struggles. Story aims to do much better, but there are precedents, and we are not in totally uncharted territory.
4. Dispute Module and how it works
As @jwpark02 points out, there are many components of story, such as tokenizing IP, accelerating royalties, handling licensing. Dispute is one amongst many, but one that I should have explained far more. So thanks for asking.
Our overall dispute module has 3 major steps: RAISE dispute, ARBITRATE dispute, RESOLVE dispute.
Raise and resolve are straightforward. Raising is flagging an IP as violating its terms (not paying royalties, copying someone else, false claims). Anyone can raise a dispute. Resolving is simply taking the result of the arbitration and slapping economic penalties based on the result.
Arbitration is the fun part. One of your misunderstandings (very fair, btw) is that arbitration is PURELY DELIBERATION and hence susceptible to rancorous BS.
Our philosophy at Story is that as a neutral protocol we should create a MARKETPLACE OF TRUST.
What this means is that any IP registered on Story can choose any ARBITRATION POLICY (programmatic and fully onchain via smart contracts, or even offchain oracles) they want. The moment an IP is registered on Story, that IP needs to declare an arbitration policy upfront. Everyone can see the policy they chose. If I think a policy is suspicious (too centralized, too much deliberation, etc), I simply won’t use the IP. I will ignore it. No economic value will flow. I will only build on and use an IP that has an arbitration policy, a trust mechanism, that I believe in. And anyone can write an arbitration policy. It can be as centralized as a single person, as decentralized as an entire protocol. We’ve talked to @Kleros_io and @UMAprotocol about running some of these policies. Even legal firms could specialize and create an oracle so we can access offchain arbitration. It’s up to the creator, and the the user of the IP, whether the trust mechanisms are agreed upon. If not, nothing happens.
To clarify why this marketplace strategy is beneficial (my background is in political philosophy, so apologies if this is is abstract):
There are at least 3 ways of aggregating opinions, 2 ways which involve no “BS Storytelling” because there is no deliberation or verbal dialogue at all. The first is of course deliberation, which does succumb at times to BS storytelling (but allows for more info transfer). The second is aggregation (voting), which can be done without any discussion. In fact Rousseau, perhaps in a similar vein to you, suggests that the ideal state should not allow discussion before voting. And lastly, there is economic aggregation (quadratic voting or prediction markets).
The beauty of Story’s dispute module is that it creates a marketplace for trust that allows anyone to come up with an arbitration policy, for creators to choose whatever one they like, and for anyone wanting to engage with an IP, they have the ability to check that policy and see whether they want to take the risk of using an IP. We are not an onchain court or an onchain jury. SMTP does not filter spam emails, Gmail and Hotmail do.
Further, many arbitration policies can run economic games to secure IP. For example, we have a 20 page internal writeup about how someone could create a staking protocol where anyone can stake on any IP Asset to attest to its validity and earn rewards for providing this info, and any disputer could (seeing a large stake or bounty) choose to dispute IPs that seem suspicious. If successful (again, the arbitration policy decides how this dispute is settled), the bounty is given to the disputer, if not, the disputer loses his deposit. This reminds me of liquidation in lending protocols, an entire economy of profitable information arbitrage.
And, as a final backstop, the worst case scenario on Story is the best case today - legal arbitration. This is why the Programmable IP License is so important. Every IP on Story comes backed by the PIL. If someone takes your IP after you’ve used Story, and literally all onchain methods have failed, you can take it to court. Now, the courts are the ultimate place where BS and friction arises, so we’ve created disputes as a way to avoid it. But we also recognize that creator protection is our top priority.
To conclude, appreciate your concerns. I think about these questions every day. We don’t have all the answers. But I hope this convinces you we are aware of the concerns, and Story itself exists to address them.
I feel like you just wrote the pitch for Story by describing all these problems in IP.
First off, thanks for checking this out. I’m extremely grateful when people deep dive into our docs and point out questions or concerns they have. JS Mill is my favorite philosopher and his best quote is that truths without any challenge are dead dogmas, and we have too many dead dogmas in crypto. Criticism is what turns dead dogmas into living truths. So let me try to share this living truth.
Warning: this will be quite a long answer, as you raised a lot of valid points, and I want to make sure I am thorough. Too much handwaving happens on X, unfortunately this isn’t the best medium, but let’s try.
The problems you are pointing out are EXTREMELY VALID! So valid, in fact, this is why we started Story. IP simply does NOT work for the creator, it biases towards companies with massive legal teams that essentially overwhelm small players. This is exactly why we thought the neutrality of blockchain would be a perfect antidote. So I appreciate these problems you’re raising and we think about them constantly.
“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.” I have to be honest - if every innovator accepted this, there would be no innovation, no creativity, ever. Every entrepreneur understands that risk and failure are the fertile soil of future success. Even rockets which absolutely need to be 110% reliable exploded many times before they worked. Bitcoin with PoW and Ethereum with PoS are not “100% secure and 100% reliable”, and IP is a much more difficult problem than money with regards to consensus. This is the wrong expectation to bring into a critique of any project, but I will address all your points in good faith as I believe your critique is very much in good faith as well.
The next few topics:
- Bitcoin/Ethereum vs Story, Programmatic vs Intersubjective Consensus
- Money’s Intersubjectivity Problems vs IP’s Intersubjectivity Problems
- Responding to your specific points
- How the Dispute Module actually works, misconceptions, areas for improvement
1. Bitcoin/Ethereum vs Story, Programmatic vs Intersubjective Consensus
The entire crux of your concern boils down to a CONSENSUS PROBLEM. Indeed, MONEY and BLOCKCHAINS and OUR ENTIRE SPACE runs on solving CONSENSUS PROBLEMS: technical consensus, economic consensus, and social consensus.
Imagine someone reads Satoshi’s whitepaper in 2008 and says: this will never work! Money has been about violence since the days of seashells, lenders in Venice regularly charged absurd interest rates, even fiat today sits astride the decisions of Jerome Powell and a single interest rate. Moreover, fraud is rampant on both the merchant and the buyer side, and requires people to tell their BS stories on both sides and for a single arbitrator to choose. No one will ever want to use Bitcoin, it’s a miracle that the government has wrangled in the financial system at all via guns and violence!
This is how it feels to read your critique, to be completely honest. You basically wrote our pitch. These are the exact problems that Bitcoin (and all later blockchains focused on programmable, global, immutable money) STARTED to solve. And the way we solve them is CONSENSUS, either PoW or PoS.
2. Money’s Intersubjectivity Problems vs IP’s Intersubjectivity Problems
Similarly, Story is starting in a world where the legal system is not only intersubjective, but also messy and dangerous for individual creators, with a bias towards the big actors who can wield the law as a weapon. The way Story aims to solve this is CONSENSUS via our Proof of Creativity protocol (ofc our L1 runs on PoS). However, this consensus is an INTERSUBJECTIVE CONSENSUS, not a PROGRAMMATIC CONSENSUS with programmatic slashing like Ethereum PoS.
Even money itself suffers from intersubjective consensus, eg payment fraud. How do you determine who is right or wrong between the merchant and the buyer? Both will make up stories to be right. These are live problems, but I don’t see people critiquing the idea that stablecoins can eventually replace payment rails around the world.
It is true that IP is almost entirely an intersubjective consensus problem, which does indeed make it more difficult. That is why from a historical perspective Bitcoin and Ethereum had to come first, and we’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t, and as Story evolves and faces challenges, we will continue to learn.
3. Responding to your specific points
On the messiness of deliberation: “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.” I share your concerns around the size of the problem, but I am not as pessimistic as you. This describes every city council, every constitutional convention, and god knows, every single DAO. Yet over time, this is how innovation happens, often not with a strike of genius but through the long and unsexy trial and error process. Further, as I will cover later, the dispute module creates a MARKETPLACE OF TRUST, and people can opt into dispute mechanisms that don’t involve any deliberation at all, but rather rely on voting or economic staking.
On the post facto nature of the current legal system, and how Story makes it pre facto: “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.” Your example around the drum sound perfectly encapsulates the issues with the current system. Give the current IP system, which makes registration and monetization difficult, disputes are handled POST FACTO. Artists don’t register their work because it’s too difficult, and as a result, others who use that IP don’t know what the terms are around it. BECAUSE of the problems with the current IP system, we get the situations you just pointed out. Story is making it extremely seamless for creators to register IP, and for anyone in the world to see their terms programmatically, making the legal system more efficient and just by making everything explicit and pre facto so that these problems never occur. Prevention is more valuable than a cure.
On pricing IP: “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?” Again, this is an exact pitch for why Story is important. So much of the legal system is POST FACTO. On Story, Radiohead or any creator can explicitly program and set the cost/royalties/terms of using their IP, and others can take it or leave it. This is all on chain. So now, others can easily see what it costs to use IP. And if they steal it, Radiohead can point to onchain history. On what happens when people wrongly claim onchain history, I will discuss that in the dispute module overview.
On the continued aversion to deliberation as an information aggregation mechanism, and the familiar descent into relativism: “Essentially everything will boil down to the ability to formulate bullshit stories to convince whoever decides the outcome of these disputes.” “It will be impossible to distinguish the owner of a sound, a style, a look, and even a story through Story Protocol.” “Will they have a full-on jury trial to find out if a snare drum sound belongs to HumpLord42069 or RizzKing911?” Great names btw, these names are IP. Again, deliberation is only one of many ways of aggregating preferences, in fact the most susceptible to BS. Story’s dispute module has other options. Also, I think it’s a bit cynical to point at everything subjective as necessarily a “bullshit story”. Just because there is room for interpretation doesn’t mean we need to take the slippery slope down to relativism. Plato famously defined humans as featherless bipeds, and the legend goes that Diogenes plucked a chicken off its feathers and said “Behold, a man!“. Just because we struggle to explicitly define things does not mean we can’t do it in practice. Even Plato struggles sometimes :)
On the potential concern that no one will ever actually pay up: Also, I’d like to point at that MANY businesses have already cracked the dispute resolution problem, albeit in a smaller scale with a single closed/permissioned platform in a single medium. I could easily right click save as Getty images, but I don’t. The NYT chooses to pay for it even though they could rip it off. Why? Because it is easier to do that than to get sued, and also reputation matters. There are already billion dollar businesses like Getty built off of licensing IP online, despite all the struggles. Story aims to do much better, but there are precedents, and we are not in totally uncharted territory.
4. Dispute Module and how it works
As @jwpark02 points out, there are many components of story, such as tokenizing IP, accelerating royalties, handling licensing. Dispute is one amongst many, but one that I should have explained far more. So thanks for asking.
Our overall dispute module has 3 major steps: RAISE dispute, ARBITRATE dispute, RESOLVE dispute.
Raise and resolve are straightforward. Raising is flagging an IP as violating its terms (not paying royalties, copying someone else, false claims). Anyone can raise a dispute. Resolving is simply taking the result of the arbitration and slapping economic penalties based on the result.
Arbitration is the fun part. One of your misunderstandings (very fair, btw) is that arbitration is PURELY DELIBERATION and hence susceptible to rancorous BS.
Our philosophy at Story is that as a neutral protocol we should create a MARKETPLACE OF TRUST.
What this means is that any IP registered on Story can choose any ARBITRATION POLICY (programmatic and fully onchain via smart contracts, or even offchain oracles) they want. The moment an IP is registered on Story, that IP needs to declare an arbitration policy upfront. Everyone can see the policy they chose. If I think a policy is suspicious (too centralized, too much deliberation, etc), I simply won’t use the IP. I will ignore it. No economic value will flow. I will only build on and use an IP that has an arbitration policy, a trust mechanism, that I believe in. And anyone can write an arbitration policy. It can be as centralized as a single person, as decentralized as an entire protocol. We’ve talked to @Kleros_io and @UMAprotocol about running some of these policies. Even legal firms could specialize and create an oracle so we can access offchain arbitration. It’s up to the creator, and the the user of the IP, whether the trust mechanisms are agreed upon. If not, nothing happens.
To clarify why this marketplace strategy is beneficial (my background is in political philosophy, so apologies if this is is abstract):
There are at least 3 ways of aggregating opinions, 2 ways which involve no “BS Storytelling” because there is no deliberation or verbal dialogue at all. The first is of course deliberation, which does succumb at times to BS storytelling (but allows for more info transfer). The second is aggregation (voting), which can be done without any discussion. In fact Rousseau, perhaps in a similar vein to you, suggests that the ideal state should not allow discussion before voting. And lastly, there is economic aggregation (quadratic voting or prediction markets).
The beauty of Story’s dispute module is that it creates a marketplace for trust that allows anyone to come up with an arbitration policy, for creators to choose whatever one they like, and for anyone wanting to engage with an IP, they have the ability to check that policy and see whether they want to take the risk of using an IP. We are not an onchain court or an onchain jury. SMTP does not filter spam emails, Gmail and Hotmail do.
Further, many arbitration policies can run economic games to secure IP. For example, we have a 20 page internal writeup about how someone could create a staking protocol where anyone can stake on any IP Asset to attest to its validity and earn rewards for providing this info, and any disputer could (seeing a large stake or bounty) choose to dispute IPs that seem suspicious. If successful (again, the arbitration policy decides how this dispute is settled), the bounty is given to the disputer, if not, the disputer loses his deposit. This reminds me of liquidation in lending protocols, an entire economy of profitable information arbitrage.
And, as a final backstop, the worst case scenario on Story is the best case today - legal arbitration. This is why the Programmable IP License is so important. Every IP on Story comes backed by the PIL. If someone takes your IP after you’ve used Story, and literally all onchain methods have failed, you can take it to court. Now, the courts are the ultimate place where BS and friction arises, so we’ve created disputes as a way to avoid it. But we also recognize that creator protection is our top priority.
To conclude, appreciate your concerns. I think about these questions every day. We don’t have all the answers. But I hope this convinces you we are aware of the concerns, and Story itself exists to address them.
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