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What changes can Euterpe bring to copyright?

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Jerry Liu explains the impact of China's copyright law changes on the NFT market

Copyright NFT Platform Euterpe Berkeley interprets changes in China's Copyright Law

Jerry Liu

On May 24, Euterpe co-founder Jerry Liu, a PhD in intellectual property law at Stanford University and a fellow at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, was invited to deliver a lecture on China's copyright law at the University of California, Berkeley. In this speech, Professor Liu introduced the revision of China's copyright law mainly from three aspects: audio-visual works, applied art works and artificial intelligent-generated works.

At the end of his talk, Professor Liu pointed out that this revision of China's copyright law will provide an accelerator for Euterpe, the IP-NFT market. This is not the first time Jerry has mentioned the innovative concept of copyright NFT in a public presentation. So what exactly is copyright NFT, and what innovative changes can copyright NFT bring to the music industry?

Traditional music industry pain point

As we all know, music streaming media born in the Web2 era has changed the way of music consumption to a great extent, enabling people to hear all kinds of music works more widely and conveniently. However, due to the large number of middlemen, complex value chain and opaque copyright data, rampant piracy, the rights and interests of music creators are difficult to maintain, the authorization of secondary creation and use of music is difficult, and the complexity of value chain leads to low payment efficiency, etc., which have become important factors hindering the development of music industry. To put it simply, musicians who are not at the top are actually at the bottom of the music industry chain. Musicians have to go through a number of middlemen to release their songs. Even if a work is completely created by themselves, after the release of the work in the market, musicians have a very low proportion of the right to control and profit.

Euterpe aims at this market pain point and wants to solve this problem through NFT technology, so as to maximize the interests of creators, fans and investors and reshape the distribution model of the music industry.

What changes will Euterpe's copyright NFT bring?

NFT technology refers to a traceable and immutable token by taking specific digital or physical assets as digital units and creating a series of identifiable blocks of data to store on the blockchain. Based on the features of the technology, Euterpe expands the total amount of Copyrights that can be allocated, bringing the market unit price of streaming back to 0.01 yuan, almost three times that of Spotify (0.00397 yuan) and YouTube (0.00074 yuan). By minimizing the transaction costs involved in copyright licensing, Euterpe dramatically increased the creator's share of the royalty distribution from 15 percent to 100 percent. In all, Euterpe allows creators to earn 16 times more streaming revenue than Spotify and 80 times more than YouTube.

In addition, the Euterpe Smart Contract will automatically enforce rights and obligations under the copyright license agreement whenever a user plans to enjoy a work within the Euterpe community. Euterpe distributes 100 per cent of the relevant royalties to copyright owners in seconds, rather than months, after a user selects and acquires a work. Payments could also be divided directly on a sliding scale, allowing many rights holders, including creators, record labels and publishers, to take their share at the same time.

Euterpe has developed a variety of innovative tools based on blockchain technology to prevent copyright disputes and combat online infringement. Most importantly, it builds an ecosystem that fosters healthy socioeconomic conditions and encourages all users, including creators and fans, to benefit from each other rather than fighting piracy.

Relevant background

本文最开始提到 Euterpe 的联合创始人 Jerry 是斯坦福大学知识产权法博士、斯坦福大学互联网与社会中心研究员。除此之外，由 Jerry 撰写的 Euterpe 项目白皮书获得了 2021 年全球法律科技大会 Machine Lawyering Conference 头等奖。该白皮书还是全球首个在 SSCI 美国核心法律期刊发表的区块链项目白皮书。他的研究成果被美国联邦上诉法院作为判决依据裁决了当年轰动一时的 NFT 加密艺术之父 Andy Warhol 版权案。

团队的其他成员分别来自斯坦福大学、Google、Meta(Facebook)、Tencent Music、ByteDance/TikTok、Sony Music。运营和市场方面的负责人是 Uber 和 DoorDash 领导北美增长的产品经理，以及前 OKCoin 的市场高管。

Overall, Euterpe is a team of blockchain innovators and IP experts with a very strong resource background.