Razick, I had this idea about a week ago and have been thinking about it constantly since. Funny how that works!

My thoughts lead to some extensions on this idea in the context of torrent tracking communities like What.cd, and the possibility of having monetized media sharing communities that collect royalties for the content originators.

To make this system work would require something more complicated than the ideas mentioned in this thread. I haven't had a chance to really develop my thoughts, but it could be something like:

- Use a blockchain as a decentralised 'copyright registry'. The best way to do this could be based on the hash of an uploaded file, a la proofofexistence, OR via content fingerprinting systems (unfortunately these are encumbered by patents). To make what I have in mind work automatically, you probably want to use the latter, but if we assume some centralization as in the case of communities like What.cd, then that isn't necessary.

- One of the problems with making a 'decentralised performance rights agency' work (if we assume firt of all, that users are willing to use monetized P2P communities) is that even is we successfully foster a P2P music platform that collects BTC royalties in proportion to the popularity/snatches of torrents, the platform has no way of distributing these royalties to the content creators, because it cannot verify their identity.

- By tying a file, or a sound recording or video (if we use content fingerprinting) to a Bitcoin address, via our blockchain 'copyright registry', we suddenly have a way that someone can stake an ownership claim to a piece of content.

Of course, this is a problem for everything that already exists - there's nothing stopping me registering David Bowie's back catalogue to my BTC addresses in the blockchain. But for new content, if such a system took hold it would heavily incentivize artists to 'blockchain register' their work as soon as/before it was released, which would in turn enable all kinds of automated monetization and flow of cryptocurrency royalties.