Good luck with your work!
Absolutely! We need to be held accountable.
> It's nice that there's ways to make this friendlier for creators, but wouldn't most bigger services rather block and build a cheap system in-house than rely on a SaaS/b2b product, if you don't give it away for free or price very competitively?
The biggest innovation of our company is not its technology but the business model. We in fact do give it free to all platforms, rightsholders and creators equally. How do we make money? When there is monetization occurring on the platform, we take %. It's literally the same model of VISA, where cards are free (ok, not all of them) but you pay for the transaction.
Some platforms will still try to build their own internal system, similarly to YouTube's Content ID. However as it stands right now, they are not complaint with EUCD and even they do become complaint, they are retaining extreme liability. We, on the other hand, created a setup where we are able to take this liability from the hands of the platforms while providing best service possible.
We also aligned our incentives with the success of everyone involved. If rightsholders over block, we don't get paid. If platforms can't attract creators because the system is too intrusive, we don't get paid. If creators don't benefit from our system, we don't get paid.
We intentionally built this way. We made it free to allow widespread adoption. We can scale much further than CID (currently can process 1,100 hours of content a second, or 66,000 hours a minute; while guaranteeing 5 second response time with full license being issued) but we also spent last two years working with civic societies, copyright scholars and others to help us build balance system with processes that don't favor one side over the other.
We have still long way to go, but I believe we are on a good path.
The whole point is that we can offer this system exactly because we get to share the upside with the platform, rightsholders and creators.
Great! In the interest of preserving that alignment into the future, it might be helpful to lock in important aspects of the business model by limiting your future decisions with a Ulysses pact[1]. Cory Doctorow gave a tall[2] about using Ulysses pacts in the tech industry:
>> It's not that you don't want to lose weight when you raid your Oreo stash in the middle of the night. It's just that the net present value of tomorrow's weight loss is hyperbolically discounted in favor of the carbohydrate rush of tonight's Oreos. If you're serious about not eating a bag of Oreos your best bet is to not have a bag of Oreos to eat. Not because you're weak willed. Because you're a grown up. And once you become a grown up, you start to understand that there will be tired and desperate moments in your future and the most strong-willed thing you can do is use the willpower that you have now when you're strong, at your best moment, to be the best that you can be later when you're at your weakest moment.
>> The answer to not getting pressure from your bosses, your stakeholders, your investors or your members, to do the wrong thing later, when times are hard, is to take options off the table right now.
Designing for durability and failure safety is still important when designing business models.
It's why we made the business model is built into the core of the service and can't be easily changed. Obviously where there is a will there is a way, but it would have very significant consequences to the business to do so.