IDENTITY IN THE DECENTRALISED CREATIVE ECONOMY
IDENTITY WITHIN A DECENTRALISED PLATFORM UNDERPINS MANY KEY FUNCTIONS WITH A CREATIVE ECONOMY SUCH AS CONTENT OWNERSHIP, IP RIGHTS ASSIGNMENT, PROVENANCE AND ORIGIN OF CONTENT, IDENTITY OF WORKERS.
Recourse to centralised points of authority within such platforms, such as government backed identity or third party identity providers, runs counter to the autonomy and independence offered by decentralised platforms. The project will explore technical solutions in the space of self-sovereign identity to ground identity from the digital to physical without recourse to such authorities. The project will explore usability and trust barriers to decentralised identity schemes, and legal issues around the regulation and governance of such systems.
Technical challenge
Problem: What functionality and services should a decentralised identity system provide, and how can it best provide these in the context of the decentralised creative industries to give control over identity management to the subject?
Solution: Technical
Develop a prototype decentralized self sovereign identity scheme and integrate with decentralized platforms developed for content attribution. Determine the requirements for such schemes and develop the protocols to realize them.
Cyber security challenge
Problem: How to ground identity for ownership and rights in such decentralised platforms. For example, identity in the space of NFT/token ownership transactions.
Legal challenge
Problem: How to ground identity for ownership and rights in decentralised platforms, and how to give control over the use of credentials in a privacy preserving way. For example, identity in the space of NFT/token ownership transactions, or ownership of digital assets. How are security and privacy ensured in this context to prevent misuse or theft of credentials, or unwanted loss of privacy? What trust frameworks are appropriate to underpin such platforms?
Solution: Cyber Security
Develop security protocols for issue and use of credentials within a self sovereign identity system and formalise the required security and privacy properties. Verify the protocols against the requirements in the context of trust frameworks, and incorporate them into the prototype identity system.
Legal challenge
Problem: What are the current and future rights models for decentralised platforms e.g. copyright and derivative rights? What is the enforceability of rights models and ownership on decentralised platforms.
Solution: Law
A computational turn in law that turns as much of it as possible into executable code, and finds new forms of governance for those aspects that are difficult to hide, but need new forms of enforcement to stay true to the decentralised nature of the platform and does not replicate hierarchical legal structures unnecessarily