I recently learned that CC France is experimenting with Ascribe, a tool for registering authorship of digital works, based on the “blockchain” technology behind BitCoin. In a post on the CC blog, Primavera De Filippi of CC France wrote:

“Creative Commons revolutionized online artistic practices via licenses that promote attribution, free reproduction and dissemination of content, rather than focusing on scarcity and exclusivity… Ascribe started in 2014 to help creators secure their intellectual property, with the help of the blockchain. It works with any type of licenses, including the Creative Commons licenses.”

Not everyone is excited by “free reproduction and dissemination” though. As quoted in an article by Mario Cotillard entitled ‘Ascribe Is Giving Away Artwork Recorded In Bitcoin’s Blockchain‘:



“Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said one of the most remarkable achievements of Bitcoin was its ability to make something digital scarce. Now Ascribe is taking that from the world of currencies and payments to art, so that all digital forms can be rare and, the company hopes, more valuable.”

It makes me sad to see smart people like Schmidt celebrating creative energy being wasted trying to make naturally abundant things scarcer, so they gain value in an economy designed around scarcity. Surely everyone would be better off if we can find ways to reward people for creating the abundance that’s clearly possible? Watching what Ascribe is doing is like watching a company chop down half the trees in a National Park in a farcical attempt to increase the revenue from visitors to the park. The so-called “law of supply and demand” is a rule of thumb, not a law of physics, and as my example hopefully demonstrates, it just doesn’t apply to the commons.

Ascribe is a part of an explosion of innovation launched by the success of BitCoin, and I don’t want to totally write it off. A tool for identifying the original author of a creative or informative work surely has its uses (although such a tool already exists, it’s called a book, or a record, or a signed painting), and using Ascribe in conjunction with CC licenses, and the Creator-Endorsed Mark, could be useful to free culture authors, artists, musicians, and film-makers.



However, some of Ascribe’s business goals, as described in various commentaries on the web, sound thoroughly sinister. Yet another wave of tools for DRM:

“The company raised a $2 million seed round earlier this year, and is now further developing its system, as well as the machine learning technology the firm will use to search the web for any violations in using Ascribe verified artwork.” - Mario Cottilard, BraveNewCoin



…and surveillance:

“Ascribe’s blockchain-based technology can trace the journey of any registered file to track its distribution — giving rights holders a way to prove their ownership and a better chance of prosecuting anyone who may have stolen their work.” - Abhimanyu Ghoshal, TheNextWeb

Is this really the kind of organisation CreativeCommons affiliates should be partnering with?

