(Z)iprights (www.ziprights.com) is an eBay-like marketplace (offers can be received and counter-offers made between buyers and sellers) for the exchange of copyright in creative works – not just photos, but machine instructions, architectural and other designs, dramatic works, sound recordings, etc. It’s available at www.ziprights.com and it’s free to use (just create an account or accounts and create and exchange offers).
It’s not a business (it’s a school project, and that apparent because there’s no checkout functionality built), but I think it could be, and I want to give it to folks that can realize the vision. I would like to continue to participate behind the scenes; I would also like attribution as creator of the idea, and right to use it as part of a thesis. I am at the limit of what I can create by myself, and I have a few jobs already that I enjoy. It needs to be made more user friendly but it’s all there logically.
The Vision
The problem with distributing creative works generally but especially online is that the unscrupulous steal these works because enforcing rights requires considerable financial resources. Meanwhile, conscionable buyers avoid these same works because discovering authorship is hard, and when it’s not, securing a right to lawful use requires specialized knowledge.
My main thought creating it was the desire to help independent creators (people for whom copyright is an elite topic or an abstraction). This is how I see a business being created. But in time I would expect major media companies or right management organization to want to use it for additional revenue.
For instance:
Right now you cannot create a home vacation video and add Katy Perry or whatever music to it because you don’t have a license to do that. You also cannot upload and share it using Youtube because it’ll be flagged and removed (DMCA take down or otherwise) almost immediately. Consumers are willing to pay for this privilege, though. Right now the problem is that there isn’t an effortless means to find the agent responsible for licensing, or to assemble and formalize an offer.
If you have experience with start-up projects and you think this is a sound idea, please email me and maybe it can be yours.
About Ziprights Management Corporation
Creators are driven to express themselves, and to share their creations with the world. Sometimes works shared this way will be celebrated, but often they will be ridiculed. Even when well-received, licensing for fair compensation is fraught with challenges. Then there’s the chance that they will be stolen and used for personal gain by others without compensation or attribution.
The Problem: Enforcement of rights is practically limited to large, mostly corporate actors who have the financial resources to protect their rights. Meanwhile, these same actors are often hesitant to source the availability of works produced by independent creators, because they cannot conveniently secure and formalize rights to use.
Some have stated that copyright is dead for certain categories of works. Though this view may agree with many who make works available online, (Z)iprights believes each creator should continue to control whether to assert their rights in all media.
That said, we agree that works distributed online and absent an expressed assertion of rights should be presumed to be available to be used by others. That’s something that will take years to happen. Until it does, (Z)iprights provides creators with an additional means of announcing where such a presumption is not applicable, and it provides prospective copiers, distributors and others an avenue to secure lawful use.
