WHY COALA IP?

Content creators on the internet are getting a raw deal. They get a fraction of the revenue earned by hosting and distribution platforms, even though their work is what keeps these sites filled with traffic-driving content. It's hard for a creative to make a living. Licensing is hard: the user experience is bad, and lawyers and middlemen extract the most value. In many areas, more money goes to the distributors than to the creators. Even though many consumers would be happy to pay the people who made the content they love, they aren't given the chance. Instead, they are surveilled and served ads based on their data profiles. It doesn't have to be this way.

The Coalition Of Automated Legal Applications — Intellectual Property Group (COALA IP) group was formed to address these problems. The COALA IP group is collaborating to design and implement a free and open specification for representing and licensing intellectual property. COALA IP's goal is to establish open, free, and easy-to-use ways to record attribution information and other metadata about works, assign or license rights, mediate disputes, and authenticate claims by others. We believe there should be a global standard at the data level, without the need for centralized control.

The COALA IP working group wrote this academic paper on how blockchains can support, complement, or supplement IP. Then, it co-developed this spec / whitepaper. The following slides give an overview of the spec.