IP-driven copyright NFT platform: Euterpe reshapes the music industry

On May 24, Jerry Liu, co-founder of Euterpe, PhD in Intellectual Property Law from Stanford University, and researcher at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, was invited to give a lecture on Chinese copyright law at the University of California, Berkeley. In this lecture, Professor Liu primarily introduced the amendments to Chinese copyright law from three aspects: audiovisual works, applied art works, and AI-generated works.

At the end of the lecture, Professor Liu pointed out that the recent amendments to Chinese 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 NFTs in public speeches. So what exactly is a copyright NFT, and what innovative changes can copyright NFTs bring to the music industry?

Pain Points in the Traditional Music Industry

As we all know, music streaming, which emerged in the web2 era, has greatly changed the way music is consumed, allowing people to hear various music works more widely and conveniently. However, due to the presence of many intermediaries, a complex value chain, and opaque copyright data, issues such as rampant piracy, difficulty in protecting the rights of music creators, challenges in obtaining authorization for secondary creation of music, and low payment efficiency due to a complicated value chain have become significant obstacles to the development of the music industry. In simple terms, non-top-tier musicians are essentially at the bottom of the music industry chain. Musicians must go through numerous intermediaries to release their songs, and even for a work they created entirely by themselves, their control over the work and share of the revenue after market release are very low.

Euterpe aims to address this market pain point by leveraging NFT technology to maximize the interests of creators, fans, and investors, thereby reshaping the distribution model of the music industry.

What Changes Can Euterpe's Copyright NFTs Bring?

NFT technology refers to the process of treating specific digital or physical assets as digital units and creating a series of identifiable data blocks stored on the blockchain, forming traceable and immutable tokens. Based on the characteristics of this technology, Euterpe has expanded the total distributable amount of copyright, restoring the market unit price of streaming playback to 0.01 yuan, nearly three times that of Spotify (0.00397 yuan) and fourteen times that of YouTube (0.00074 yuan). By minimizing the transaction costs involved in copyright licensing, Euterpe has significantly increased the share of creators in royalty distribution from 15% to 100%. In summary, Euterpe allows creators to earn 16 times more than Spotify and 80 times more than YouTube in streaming revenue.

Moreover, whenever a user plans to enjoy a work within the Euterpe community, Euterpe's smart contract will automatically execute the rights and obligations under the copyright licensing agreement. After users select and obtain a work, Euterpe can allocate 100% of the relevant royalty income to the copyright holders within seconds (instead of months). It can also directly proportionally distribute rewards, allowing numerous copyright holders, including creators, record companies, and publishers, to simultaneously receive their respective shares.

Euterpe's various innovative tools developed based on blockchain technology can prevent copyright disputes and combat online infringement. Most importantly, the ecosystem it builds fosters healthy socio-economic conditions, encouraging all users, including creators and fans, to benefit mutually without being entangled in combating piracy.

Related Background

At the beginning of this article, it was mentioned that Euterpe's co-founder Jerry is a PhD in Intellectual Property Law from Stanford University and a researcher at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. In addition, the Euterpe project white paper written by Jerry won the first prize at the 2021 Global Legal Tech Conference Machine Lawyering Conference. This white paper is also the first blockchain project white paper published in an SSCI core legal journal in the United States. His research findings were used by the U.S. Court of Appeals as a basis for ruling in the sensational NFT copyright case involving Andy Warhol.

Other team members come from Stanford University, Google, Meta (Facebook), Tencent Music, ByteDance/TikTok, and Sony Music. The heads of operations and marketing are product managers who led North American growth at Uber and DoorDash, as well as former market executives from OKCoin.

In summary, Euterpe is a team composed of blockchain innovators and intellectual property experts, with a very strong resource background.