> what we need is copyright reform to bring balance back to the public good, away from megacorporations and the rent-seeking grandchildren of the grandchildren of the original creators;

I agree 100%! In the meantime, we can start in the private sector by building tools to assist the legal profession long before statutory law can catch up with current technologies.

> From my reading it sounds like this blockchain-based proof-of-copyright is a solution looking for a problem.

We've been working with these concepts for almost two years and to be honest we did spend a lot of time staring a solution looking for a problem. We've had a gut feeling that we were on to something and luckily in the last six months or so we've found a number of customers, both in the legal services industry and in individual authors, that have helped guide us towards the service that we're now offering at https://blockai.com

We already have paying customers!

> and a push back to requiring registration of copyright to be granted protection

I disagree. People need to be able to find the copyright owners in a central registry so we don't end up with the problems surrounding orphan works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works

> In cases where the infringer is unreachable (anonymous website hosted in Sealand), proof of ownership wouldn't be helpful anyway.

This is really an article into itself, but Open Publish really wants to explore the idea of "code as law". If you use honorable software that enforces notions of intellectual property for users, then all users who use honorable software will be enforcing any notions of intellectual property.

I'll give a really rough example using music. People can choose to use Spotify, which is honorable software, in that it honors existing IP contracts, or they can choose to use dishonorable software like The Pirate Bay, which chooses not to honor existing IP contracts.

BitTorrent itself is just a distribution technology and it is completely agnostic to the concept of ownership. Open Publish is just decentralized accounting software that is completely agnostic to the concept of distribution. Both are completely agnostic to the existing legal systems in which they operate. BitTorrent can be used legally by Blizzard to push out updates or it can be used illegally by The Pirate Bay to infringe on copyrights.

As long as we can make easy to use software that is legally valid, we expect people will choose to use the honorable software. In any case, legal pressure causes illegal sites to do things that harm customer experiences. At some point people seem to decide to subscribe to services like Netflix instead of trying to figure out why Popcorn Time stopped working.

The Pirate Bay could build a system using Open Publish that also honored the existing IP contracts and directed payments to the rights-holders while continuing to use BitTorrent for distribution, but only if all of those rights-holders had already registered their works with Open Publish, which is one of many reasons why Blockai is currently focused on the registration process.

By using Bitcoin or other blockchains we can take advantage of its decentralized consensus properties and can build honorable software that is open, transparent and equal-access. Spotify might be honorable software but it is most definitely closed, opaque and has very uneven relationships across individuals and corporations. We think we can all figure out a much better solution.