Blockchains (smart contracts, distributed ledgers) and rights management broadly construed are the themes of today's Spotlight Applications. Assigned to Aurign, the first application discloses techniques for tracking authorship attribution and creating music publishing agreements from metadata. Assigned to Factom, the second application discloses techniques for digital or "smart" contracts executing in a blockchain environment.
20210272222, "System and methods for tracking authorship attribution and creating music publishing agreements from metadata," assigned to Aurign, Inc.
Abstract
Systems and methods relating to a platform for creating, monitoring, updating, and executing legal agreements for data files such as a collaborate digital media file using associated metadata. The platform enables music publishing agreements to be generated automatically by taking metadata from a DAW (digital audio workstation) that reflects the activity and contributions of each author associated with a file. Authorship metadata can be recorded on a ledger or blockchain by the platform. The platform enables calculation and disbursement of royalties to be automated by algorithmic determination of terms of an authenticated smart contract using authorship metadata for an associated media file generating the royalty. Authors may concurrently contribute from across a variety of different DAWs, local and remote, and computing resources may be distributed by the platform.
20210272103, "Smart contracts in blockchain environments," assigned to Factom, Inc.
Abstract
Digital or "smart" contracts execute in a blockchain environment. Any entity (whether public or private) may specify a digital contract via a blockchain. Because there may be many digital contracts offered as virtual services, the contract identifier uniquely identifies a particular decision table and/or the digital contract offered by a virtual machine, vendor or supplier. The blockchain is thus not burdened with the programming code that is required to execute the decision table and/or the digital contract. The blockchain need only include or specify the contract identifier (and perhaps one or more contractual parameters), thus greatly simplifying the blockchain and reducing its size (in bytes) and processing requirements.
