Attribution without ownership

Blockchain infrastructure and the cultural commons

The landscape of projects building on-chain infrastructure for culture is varied and expanding. At the Layer 1 level, a growing number of projects are building purpose-built chains to manage, license, and track creative works. Many aim to solve genuine problems of transparency, fair compensation, and provenance for digital creators. However, nearly all of them operate from a shared, often unexamined premise: that a creative work is, first and foremost, a piece of property to be owned, managed, and monetized.

The deeper question, then, is not whether blockchain can make existing systems work better. It is whether blockchain enables a different way of thinking about cultural works altogether. What if the technology that makes assets traceable and programmable could also make them unownable? What if the decentralisation that characterises blockchain governance could be turned from the management of property to the stewardship of the cultural commons? The argument of this paper is that a non-proprietary framework for cultural works is both imaginable and technically feasible, and that blockchain infrastructure, if designed accordingly, could support it.

This paper surveys the emerging landscape of on-chain cultural infrastructure, identifies the assumptions that these projects share, and outlines what a non-proprietary approach would require. The aim is not to position any one project as a competitor to the others, but to clarify what a genuinely non-proprietary framework might look like — and to ask whether it can be built.

The landscape

Several Web3 projects are addressing culture and creativity through blockchain infrastructure.

Story Protocol is arguably the most prominent, a Cosmos SDK-based Layer-1 blockchain designed to make intellectual property “programmable”. It allows creators to register works as NFTs that contain automated licensing terms and royalty splits, enforceable via its Programmable IP License (PIL). Its goal is to create a global, efficient IP marketplace.

Similarly, Camp Network positions itself as the "Autonomous IP Layer" for the AI era. Its core innovation is a Proof of Provenance (PoP) Protocol, which cryptographically tracks the origin and use of content at the protocol level. This is designed to ensure that AI systems and other users can be automatically and fairly charged for the data they use.

FaiRemix focuses specifically on the culture of remixing. It introduces a "Proof of Inspiration" (PoI), a cryptographic primitive that allows creators to provably link their work to its upstream influences. This creates a transparent graph of creative lineage, ensuring that original artists receive automatic attribution and royalties when their work inspires something new.

Finally, projects like SilentBerry and PubDAO represent a more focused, application-specific approach. SilentBerry is a decentralized publishing platform built on the Bitcoin network via the RGB++ protocol. It allows authors to inscribe books onto the Bitcoin blockchain, converting ownership and revenue rights into tradable digital assets. PubDAO is a "Media DAO" seeking to redefine media production and distribution using Web3 tools, aiming to become a decentralized, community-owned wire service.

These are serious projects, and they're asking important questions about how value flows through digital culture.

Where a non-proprietary approach differs

Existing on-chain IP projects build better infrastructure for an intellectual property framework they do not question. A non-proprietary approach starts from a different premise: that a work is a relational pattern, not a piece of property. From this follows a framework based not on permission but on obligation. The underlying ethos is that those who benefit from a work incur a debt — not a payment to a private rights-holder, but a contribution to the originators and the cultural commons that made the work possible. It recognises relationship: use creates a trace, and that trace generates a modest return to the commons.

This distinction has practical consequences, which can be illustrated by considering what happens to orphan works: works whose rights-holder cannot be identified or located after a diligent search. The specific rules governing orphan works vary across jurisdictions. What constitutes a diligent search in one country may differ from another, and the legal consequences of using an orphan work range from statutory licences to liability for infringement. The United States has no federal orphan works legislation at all, despite repeated reform proposals. Broadly, however, wherever copyright law requires permission for use, and the rights-holder cannot be found, use becomes legally precarious or impractical. The existing patchwork of rules can also make cross-border use of orphan works, particularly in the digital environment, fraught. The effect is that orphan works are frozen out of circulation, with museums and cultural institutions unable to place archives in the public domain. This is a failure inherent to the proprietary framework.

Imagine, then, a legal framework that did not require permission for use: a framework whose baseline was open circulation rather than exclusive control. In that hypothetical, the orphan works problem would disappear by definition. Institutions that currently cannot place archives in the public domain for fear of liability would be free to do so. Whether such a framework would also pool micro-contributions from use, or whether it would simply release works into circulation without any economic layer at all, is a separate design question — one that different communities might answer differently. This is what is at stake in the shift from a proprietary to a stewardship model. (I am not suggesting that a blockchain can unilaterally override copyright law, or that any such framework could be created by technical means alone.)

Comparison

The table below summarises the key distinctions.

Project	Core mechanism	View of the work
Story Protocol	Programmable IP licensing & royalties	A programmable asset to be owned and monetized
Camp Network	Proof of Provenance for AI & digital assets	An asset whose provenance must be tracked for fair compensation
FaiRemix	Proof of Inspiration & on-chain attribution	A node in a graph of creative influence to be rewarded
SilentBerry / PubDAO	Decentralised publishing & media production	A publishable good to be distributed and monetized more fairly
A non-proprietary register	Non-discretionary record + no token, no treasury, no gatekeeper	A relational pattern sustained through stewardship

Technical pathways

The opening question of this paper was whether blockchain enables a different way of thinking about cultural works — whether the technology that makes assets traceable could also make them 'unownable'. The orphan works example suggests that it can, but only if the infrastructure is designed accordingly. What follows from this?

Three interlocking mechanisms seem required. First, an immutable attribution registry recording causal contribution to a work without conferring exclusive rights (e.g., built on a smart contract platform such as Ethereum or a purpose-built chain). Second, a common treasury pooling contributions arising from use. Third, a governance protocol determining distributions from the treasury (e.g., a DAO-based voting mechanism). Together, these mechanisms recognise that a work's significance is not fixed at creation but emerges through use, reinterpretation, and cultural revival. The model thus sustains the conditions of cultural production while resisting re-commodification and without the logic of ownership or exclusion.

These are the mechanisms that follow from the logic of the argument. How they are realised in practice remains open. I have not committed to a single technical stack, and a working prototype has already been built on EAS attestations on the Celo network, content-addressed storage on Filebase/IPFS, an ENS name, and static HTML/CSS/JS. That prototype — the register at eo1collective.org — is one instance of the approach described here, developed with the Eo1 collective. It is not the argument itself. The argument stands whether or not any particular implementation persists.

The on-chain attribution registry would be the foundational layer. It needs to record data such as who contributed to a work and when, without conferring any exclusive rights. In some existing projects, this function is served by NFTs. Story Protocol, for example, requires creators to mint an NFT as "ownership over the IP" before registering it on the chain. That NFT then becomes an "IP Asset" to which licensing terms and royalty splits can be attached. Camp Network similarly tokenises IP assets as ERC-721 NFTs with "traceable provenance, usage rights, and attribution baked in at the protocol level". SilentBerry divides book ownership and revenue rights into tiered NFTs (Gold, Silver, Copper Berries).

In these examples, the NFT is a mechanism through which ownership, licensing, and monetisation are enforced on-chain. The NFT can be traded, sold, or used as collateral.

A non-proprietary approach rejects this logic, and therefore requires a different approach. A registry is required to record attribution, but this does not need to be an NFT, and, crucially, it must not be transferable. The registry must be non-transferable because transferability would turn attribution into a commodity. If the record of origin can be bought and sold, it ceases to be a record of origin and becomes an asset. This would break the chain of causal contribution and sever the relational link between the originator and the work. Attribution would thereby become a tradeable good, subject to speculation, concentration, and enclosure: precisely the dynamics this argument seeks to subvert. To ensure that the registry functions as a public record, not a market, it should be non-transferable.

Simply put, the registry needs to record a chain of origin: a public, immutable record of causal contribution. The technical implementation might be a smart contract on an existing chain, or a custom module on a purpose-built chain.

Several options exist, each with different trade-offs. A smart contract on an existing chain like Ethereum offers programmability and immediate access to existing infrastructure. It can enforce non-transferability and interact with other contracts, such as the treasury or governance protocol. The trade-off is cost: each registration and each use incurs transaction fees, which may be prohibitive for micro-contributions.

A soulbound token (SBT) is a non-transferable token permanently bound to a single address. It might seem to serve these purposes: when a creator registered a work, an SBT could be issued to their address containing the work's metadata and cryptographically proving their role as originator. Because it could not be transferred, it could not be sold or assigned. But an SBT is still a thing held. It ties the record to a holder — and if the holder is unavailable, through loss of the wallet, incapacity, or death, the record would be bound to a credential that no one can access. More fundamentally, a token of any kind treats attribution as a possession, even if a permanent and non-transferable one. A public record that belongs to no one is a different kind of object. Whether that difference can be expressed in a token at all is one of the open questions in this line of work.

A custom module on a purpose-built chain offers the highest degree of control. The registry, treasury, and governance can be designed as native modules, with rules encoded at the protocol level rather than in smart contracts. This avoids transaction cost issues and allows for deeper customisation. The trade-off is complexity: bootstrapping a new chain requires significant resources and a validator network.

At the most basic level, the registry can be something simpler: a signed attestation stored on IPFS, anchored periodically to a blockchain for timestamping. The attestation demo and Site Integrity Heartbeat on this site explore this more primitive prototype.

Ethereum and the "world computer"

Ethereum is often described as a "world computer", in that it was designed to function as a shared, neutral, global platform where anyone can build and run applications without relying on any central authority. Blockchain can thus be conceived as a platform for programmable governance — a way to encode rules that cannot be changed by any single party. If the word "governance" is off-putting because it evokes bureaucracy or control, another way of putting it might be "codified common agreement". Either way, the fundamental idea is that a blockchain can encode the rules by which a community chooses to operate, in a transparent manner that cannot be tampered with.

A brief description of the infrastructure, for those unfamiliar: the network runs on a distributed set of computers (nodes), governed by consensus rather than any single entity. Developers can deploy smart contracts — programs stored on the blockchain that execute automatically when certain conditions are met. Users interact with these contracts by sending transactions, which are validated by the network and recorded immutably.

Within this ecosystem, the native cryptocurrency, Ether (ETH), has two basic functions. First, it pays for computation: every on-chain transaction (whether transferring funds or executing a smart contract) consumes computational resources, and users pay for this in ETH, known as "gas fees". This prevents the network from being overwhelmed by spam and also aligns incentives, in that users pay for what they use.

Second, ETH secures the network. Those who run the nodes that validate transactions stake ETH as collateral to participate in consensus. If they act dishonestly, they can lose their stake. This creates an economic incentive to act in the network's best interest.

This second function is suggestive for a project of cultural stewardship. We could think about 'gas' in purely cultural terms: a cultural stewardship protocol might ask users to contribute to the commons in non-material ways. Ethereum's model is economic — value is staked, and value can be lost. A cultural stewardship model is socio-cultural: contribution need not be a monetary transaction but a participation in creative and intellectual flourishing. The question is whether a protocol can encode this kind of contribution, and whether the flow of cultural value can be aligned with the health of the commons, rather than with the accumulation of capital.

The choice of infrastructure will ultimately depend on the priorities of the community that gathers around the work.

Conclusion

This is what distinguishes a non-proprietary approach: it is not a technical fix for an existing system. It is a different cultural and legal imagination — one that treats cultural works as shared inheritance, subject to stewardship and care, rather than private property to be managed and sold.

The question this paper asks is whether we can build a model that recognises the author's connection to the work without making that connection a property right. That question sits inside a larger research programme, of which this is one paper: an enquiry into what it means for a work to live, and how law and infrastructure might be arranged to let it.

TLDR ;)

This is what distinguishes BLACKBOX: It is not a technical fix for an existing system. It is a different cultural and legal imagination: one that treats cultural works as shared inheritance, subject to stewardship and care, rather than private property to be managed and sold.

The question this project asks is whether we can build a model that recognises the author's connection to the work without making that connection a property right.

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