This Machine Kills Copyright: Minting a Bob Dylan Song As a Way to Resurrect Folk Traditions

By MacEagon Voyce 10/18/23

Can web3 and blockchain usher in a new era of common ownership in creative endeavors like music more akin to the folk era? Here’s 9,000 words to say it can.

Music NFTs NFT

This Machine Kills Copyright: Minting a Bob Dylan Song As a Way to Resurrect Folk Traditions

Can permissionless blockchains coexist with the private ownership of intellectual property? Let’s mint an NFT and find out.

In the 1960s, folk music was scuffling with its transition from tribal to individual, caught up in the larger entertainment industry’s growing infatuation with idolatry. "Transformation has always been part of the American idea: in the New World, anyone can become a new person,” writes David Hajdu in his book Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña.

“The irony of Robert Zimmerman's metamorphosis into Bob Dylan lies in the application of so much illusion and artifice in the name of truth and authenticity. Archie Leach and Norma Jean Baker became Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe when they went into show business; but folk [music] was supposed to be neither business nor show.”

Alas, business and show is what it became. Idols emerged. And the power of copyright helped enable a transformation from music of the folk into music of a folk, incentivizing artists like Bob Dylan to use the folk canon to elevate his own mythos as an icon. Our cherished bard built a career atop the hearts and stories of those who came before him, and that’s important to recognize.

“I learned lyrics and how to write them from listening to folk songs,” he said in his 2015 MusiCares Person of the Year speech. “And I played them, and I met other people that played them back when nobody was doing it. Sang nothing but these folk songs, and they gave me the code for everything that’s fair game, that everything belongs to everyone.”

Outside the folk tradition, though, everything does not belong to everyone. In 2020, Dylan sold his songwriting catalog to Universal Music Group (UMG) for an undisclosed amount that was initially thought to be $300 million but is probably closer to $400 million. In 2022, he sold his recorded music rights to Sony Music Group – also for an undisclosed amount, but based on the recordings’ annual global revenue, it’s estimated to be valued at about $200 million. Without question, Dylan is a superlative songwriter, but (especially) in the context of a transmissive music and an “everything belongs to everyone” spirit, it makes no sense for one folk to have all that wealth.

Dylan is hardly the only beneficiary of this system, but I chose to pick on him because he’s benefitted more than most – even while espousing folk-like views that are at odds with that benefit. And there are other more personal reasons I chose him, too. Like Dylan, I’m a small town Minnesota boy who plays acoustic guitar and writes songs. I aspire to his skills as a wordsmith. He’s a hometown hero and global legend – which made it all the more disheartening to learn that his character is jaded by believable accounts of inauthenticity and straight-up theft.

Dylan took the folk idiom, recreated it in his own image and then refused to abide by it, earning hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. The point isn’t to discredit his skills as a songwriter or wordsmith, or to diminish his character. Dylan’s musical borrowing is very folk, but the individualism – perpetuated by the legal precedent of copyright – with which he maneuvered was not. And it’s the latter that enabled him to accumulate so much wealth.

Today, on-chain music is creating opportunities to resurrect and reestablish more collective, folk-driven methodologies that can be more equitable to individual music-makers. In order to manifest that reality, though, we’ll have to reckon with a natural tension: an open source, permissionless ethos – this time across public blockchains – and the power and precedent of traditional copyright.

How can we find ways to harness the superpowers of the blockchain – decentralization, immutability and provenance – without harming creators who still rely on copyright to earn money? How can we protect creators’ rights while also embracing the truth that everything is a remix, that genius is a fallacy, and that collective attribution of the folk is a much healthier way to share and celebrate art?

As we wrestle with legacy concepts of ownership – as well as a memetic Internet culture that is increasingly at odds with them – and the legal murk web3, we have an opportunity to create new precedence through action – to embrace solutions that redistribute wealth from one folk to many.

In search of that precedent, I tussled with the origins and evolution of copyright, spoke with myriad experts and creators, examined important cases that helped maintain existing power structures, and ultimately minted my own cover of a Bob Dylan song, testing the bounds of a system in which we’ve been forced to operate for too long.

Music on Internet

Our story begins in Japan. This past March, the world lost Ryuichi Sakamoto, a singular composer whose spirit embodied a folk-like wisdom and whimsy. He won an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Grammy and two Golden Globes in his lifetime, but his most enduring legacy is the care he gave to the collective.

He was famously exploratory – unafraid to both speak against legacy paradigms and experiment with new technologies. The composer conducted the world’s first pay-per-view live-streamed concert, for instance. He wrote music for video games and re-scored the playlist of his favorite Manhattan restaurant – all while using his art to advocate for climate justice and fairer copyright laws.

Sakamoto was especially vocal about copyright’s role online. In 1997 he penned a prescient paper called “Music on Internet” that he presented to an early Internet conference in Yokohama. “Given the ease of reproduction, modification and transmission of works in a digital network environment, the availability of various content such as music through the Internet could violate the copyright and economic interests of the creator,” he wrote, translated from the original Japanese. “It is an urgent task to follow and consider how the creator should protect [their] rights and economic interests on the Internet.”

“In the future, various new forms and services may be created on the Internet,” he continued. “Some of those new forms and services will come out, which current copyright law does not anticipate.”

Web3 and artificial intelligence (AI) are the latest unanticipated arrivals to the long history of copyright. Sakamoto, true to form, bore the torch and began dabbling in non-fungible tokens (NFTs) before most. The composer was intrigued by NFTs’ potential, a “welcome opportunity to reconsider the concept of ‘ownership,’” he said, where ownership can carry provenance and be distributed across an entire community.

Sakamoto’s 595 NFTs project isolated each individual note from the melody to “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” the title track from his score of the 1984 film – starring Sakamoto and David Bowie – which incorporated Japanese folk melodies and won him the BAFTA for best film music. NFTs, he thought, were part of the “[previously unimaginable] new paradigms in music” that he alluded to back in 1997.

Sakamoto’s embrace of the blockchain reflects folk-like views he’s been espousing for years. “In the old days people shared music, they didn't care who made it; a song would be owned by a village and anyone could sing it, change the words, whatever,” he said in a 2009 interview with The Guardian. “That is how humans treated music until the late 19th century. Now with the Internet we are going back to having tribal attitudes towards music.”

Copyright’s Persistence

But the industry isn’t letting the Internet carry copyright gently into that dark night. Every time a new format emerges in music, there’s a period of regulatory catch-up as copyright law hastens to fit each new square peg into its interminably round hole. Digital radio, MP3s and streaming all introduced new ways to consume music and, as such, new questions surrounding copyright and royalties – like, how should we think about value allocation across a song heard on digital radio versus a digital download? Is one more valuable than the other? Why? And how is that value quantified and then allocated to the rightsholders?

To briefly consider the complexity, we need to look at the origins of copyright, way back in the fifteenth century with the invention of the printing press. It was the first time original works could be copied at relative scale, and it introduced a perilous question: what are the rights attached to these copies and what does that mean for the creator(s) of the original work?

More than five-hundred years of analog development ensued, culminating in a fairly static system that – in the face of digital advancements – continues to shoehorn solutions that reference the antiquated system rather than update it (to be fair, it’s not the only place we cling on to archaic sources of truth – see: the bible and the U.S. Constitution).

For music, that system works like this: every song has two distinct pieces of copyright – one for the composition and one for the recording. Both pieces have two primary stakeholders. For the composition, it’s the composer and the publisher, and for the recording, it’s the artist/performer and the record label. Each of those can be subdivided if there are multiple songwriters, publishers, artists, etc.

What happens to those songs – their circuitous and variegated paths to our ears, and the subsequent financial gains that route back to the artists and other stakeholders – is where the muddled web emerges. With each new technological advancement seems to come more muddle. In broad strokes you can see that mess illustrated in the graphic below:

Because new formats threaten the controlling hierarchy of the music industry, the powers that be often seek to quash them – usually citing concerns regarding copyright infringement. The digital audio tape, for example, was available in Japan and Europe in 1987, but its release was delayed in the US upon concerns that the new format would spur widespread copyright infringement.

Later, in 1998, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) sued Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc. regarding their Rio mp3 player for the same reason. A few years after that, the RIAA filed an injunction against the peer-to-peer file sharing platform Limewire, claiming the site owed them $72 trillion – more than the GDP of the entire planet.

There’s a pattern here, of desperate attempts to control digital media’s duplicative potential, which threatens to wrest control from those powers that be. “The seeds of the industry’s collapse were contained in the digital underpinning of the new format…rendered in the binary logic of 0s and 1s,” wrote the composer, pianist and writer Ethan Iverson in a recent piece for The Nation.

The industry didn’t quite collapse, though. Let’s look back at another important case in 2000, when the RIAA sued MP3.com. MP3.com had just launched an “instant listening” service, “storing 45,000 copyrighted CDs online and streaming them out on demand.”

Even though the platform didn’t secure the proper licenses, industry executives were excited about the service, alluding to high hopes for the mp3 format once it was given a business plan. “[MP3.com] fulfills our aspirations that we've had for a long time to provide music to consumers anytime, anywhere, anyhow, on whatever device they want to receive it on," said Jeremy Silver, then vice president of new media for EMI Music.

The website offered “customers instant access to digital copies of CDs that they buy through MP3.com partners,” and said the company had plans to make it “a subscription-based service” that would also “compensate artists for the streams off its site.” Sound familiar?

John Parres, an agent with the now defunct Artists Management Group, added, "This is revolutionary in my mind. It's pushing the envelope. It really is a win, win, win all around. [MP3.com] encourages people to buy CDs, play music over and over again, and generate additional income streams for artists. It will be interesting to see what the RIAA does."

Ultimately, MP3.com settled the lawsuit and paid $53.4 million in damages. Vivendi Universal then purchased the financially strained website in 2001 before shuttering it in 2003.

But of course, that’s not the end of the story for streaming.

In 2006, Spotify emerged. The Swedish startup built the product MP3.com never did – an even more convenient version that didn’t require the purchase of CDs – added a business model and then got in bed with the industry. Many of the shareholders behind the Swedish tech behemoth are prominent members of the industry regime: UMG and Sony Music – two of the three major labels – own stakes in the streaming platform, and Tencent Holdings – which also owns stakes in UMG and the third major label, Warner Music Group (WMG) – is one of Spotify’s biggest investors.

The model began to recapture recording revenue that had been lost to piracy, and a predominant narrative emerged: streaming saved the music industry! But it did little to address more fundamental issues. The industry, you see, was already broken, its inequity demonstrated in Steve Albini’s seminal 1993 treatise in which he compared it to a shit-filled trench whose crooked contract math – he breaks this down in detail – demonstrates “just how fucked [artists] are.”

For his part, Bob Dylan has remained fairly laconic on the topic of digital music, but if we’re to take to heart his comments in a 2006 interview with Rolling Stone, perhaps he thought peer-to-peer file sharing was the final form of folk, the “everything belongs to everyone” mentality.

"It was like, 'everybody's gettin' music for free,'” he said, responding to claims by record companies and artists that illegal downloading was hurting their incomes. “I was like, 'well, why not? It ain't worth nothing anyway.’”

Web3 + AI as New Disruptors

The latest threats to industry hegemony are web3 and AI. Recently, an anonymous artist called Ghostwriter uploaded a song with AI vocals that mimic the voices of Drake and The Weeknd. Both artists release music through UMG (and its Republic Records), who promptly demanded the music be taken down from streaming services.

“Platforms have a fundamental legal and ethical responsibility to prevent the use of their services in ways that harm artists,” UMG responded in a statement.

But AI is a steamroller and everybody knows it. Spotify, Tencent, Bytedance and even Audius have rolled out AI features, and every major label has an equity stake in a music AI startup, hedging their bets amidst this sea change. Despite Universal’s forceful wrenching of the infamous AI Drake track from streaming platforms, even Lucian Grainge quickly changed his tune.

“We are open to, in terms of licensing, any business solution. Obviously we have to respect our artists and the integrity of their work,” he said while earning thousands of times more money than the average working musician. “So yes, we’re open for business with [AI companies] which are legitimate, which are supportive, and [with] which we can create a partnership for growth.”

To this, writing in Applied Science, Jon Tanners commented, “The spirit calling from deep inside Grainge’s tacit admission is so simple as to sound ridiculous: Make it easier to do an activity legally than illegally, and a majority of people will flock to the legal means. Consider the complexities of AI-generated creation another way – we are no longer battling the bootlegging of existing intellectual property (IP), but rather the mass birth of new intellectual property based on the voices and styles of established artists.”

The sentiment, he continued, “implicitly concede[s] that AI’s superbloom will require a more malleable response from the music industry than the rusty hammer taken to illegal downloading nearly a quarter century ago.”

During that quarter century, the US-based non-profit Creative Commons emerged. Co-founded by Lawrence Lessig and Eric Eldred in 2001, Creative Commons introduced a series of licenses that carved a middle ground between the extremes of strict copyright and public domain. By themselves, the extremes weren’t working.

On one side, “all rights reserved” copyright protected the economic interests of rightsholders, but access to information was walled off. On the other, piracy and illegal downloading eased access to that information, but failed to direct economic value back to creators (though there are some indirect success stories, like an online community in the early aughts that pirated the Arctic Monkeys (and other indie rock darlings) in droves. On the surface it was burglary, yes – “you wouldn’t download a car” – but the far-reaching connectivity of the Internet helped elevate the band to A-listers that could sell out stadiums).

Creative Commons licenses were developed in response to the challenges and limitations of traditional copyright in the digital age. Varying attribution requirements across licenses, for instance, allowed creators to customize the distribution of their works. Ultimately, the goal was to strike a balance between protecting creators' rights and encouraging the spread of knowledge and creativity.

The blockchain was built in that same spirit, oriented toward the decentralization and democratization of information. As the composer Ryuichi Sakamoto observed, it was an opportunity to reconsider the concept of ownership, which could have far-reaching implications for the creative industries. The music industry, though, was built atop traditional “all rights reserved” copyright, which means that web3 and AI don’t fit neatly into its scaffolding.

The AI Drake song is an example of the discordance, and it gained another layer of complexity when someone minted a copy of the song onto the blockchain, a distributed technology that makes takedowns markedly more difficult because of two of its superpowers: decentralization and a stickier sense of permanence.

With the blockchain, not only is there the potential to digitally duplicate, now the powers that be have to reckon with immutable content that can persist beyond walled gardens. If content is stored on a distributed database and not on a centralized server, then platforms can’t take down infringing content. They don’t own or control it. So even when platforms disappear, on-chain content endures.

In late 2021, for example, the popular NFT marketplace Hic Et Nunc was suddenly shut down and taken offline, but because Tezos – the energy-efficient blockchain on which the marketplace was built – is open-source, and because media files were kept on a storage system called IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) that transposes data directly onto the blockchain, the community was able to come together and replicate the marketplace.

Without the traditional walls, the system of copyright begins to crumble. The burden of “fundamental legal and ethical responsibility” – as UMG put it in their statement – becomes more elusive. And it becomes very difficult to prevent people from uploading content for which they don’t own the rights – as the AI Drake uploader did – invoking Sakamoto’s 1997 concern that the Internet could “violate the copyright and economic interests of the creator.”

Private Ownership in Public Spaces

The words of both UMG and Sakamoto allude to a major point of dissonance in web3: the permissionless ethos of public blockchains and the private ownership of the intellectual property stored on them. For a public blockchain like Ethereum, anyone can technically build on top of something like a music NFT. But as the excellent music research community Water & Music reminds us, that doesn’t preclude copyright law, which in many jurisdictions automatically confers ownership rights.

Under current US copyright law, for instance, an original song is automatically protected by copyright – whether it’s registered or not – when it is created and “fixed,” i.e. documented in any tangible medium. But the idea of “fixed” belies a fundamental truth – that ideas are products of collective invention.

Consider when the term Anthropophagy—the custom of eating human flesh—was reclaimed as a worldview by Brazilian philosopher, Oswald de Andrade. The credo is a symbolic devouring and digesting of external influences and information, and their subsequent transformation into something new and entirely Brazilian, where the flesh of one piece becomes the stem cells of another.

As individuals, we too cannibalize the information of others for the construction of ourselves. Plumbing through the deluge, we gradually hone in on our music, the stuff that strikes like lightning and catalyzes our own art. We devour the flesh of others to discover what exists in our own.

If we acknowledge this, we must also acknowledge that it makes little sense to claim sole ownership of the stuff that comes out when we put pen to paper. This has always been true. Folk is a manifestation of that essence. The pursuit of decentralization is a reflection of a revived awareness of this truth, and in a memetic digital world, the precedent of copyright is becoming increasingly untenable.

In a study earlier this year, preceding an academy focused on global music rights, Water & Music facilitated a digital survey to poke at this key question. Given the paradox of web3’s push for decentralized data and copyright’s extant status as the de facto mechanism for tracking creator income: “should we embrace or fight the integration of traditional copyright law into blockchain architecture?”

It’s tempting to take up arms and fight, but as we’ve already learned, the powers that uphold traditional copyright are exceedingly skilled at retrofitting new formats into its overarching structure, and it’s rational to believe that will continue to be the case. “In reality, the ecosystem that we are building will be alongside copyright, legal structures, not ignoring them,” Dan Fowler wrote in his piece, “Mapping out the on-chain music ecosystem.”

He continued, “It makes no sense to expect a creator who wants to engage in the on-chain ecosystem to give up their copyright protection.”

And why should they? Artists have already ceded plenty of control over their music, but as Sakamoto recognized, the blockchain – and the Internet at large – introduced an entirely different relationship with culture.

“Increasingly, we are seeing that the Internet generates and propagates a different set of values from the pre-Internet era. In a more connected and instantaneous world, the memetic value of content and culture is more pronounced,” Fowler wrote in another excellent piece, “The Case for a Post Royalties Music.”

He had a simple challenge. “Can we develop a brand-new financial mechanism for music creators that works with the core mechanics of the Internet, rather than against it?”

There have been some innovative attempts to use the blockchain to develop such a device, like the Mycelia project spearheaded by Imogen Heap, who was one of the first artists to demonstrate how smart contracts could be used to circumvent traditional intermediaries. She ran some of these early experiments with Ujo Music, a defunct organization – spun out of Consensys – that sought to place rights, licensing and identity in the hands of artists.

There’s also Legato’s ongoing pursuit to create a precedent where NFTs could actually hold and enforce licenses via smart contracts, and Nina Protocol’s Hubs feature, a mechanism at the protocol level that tracks relationships built around music.

Artists, too – like Supertight Woody – are envisaging a way for NFTs to help facilitate a paradigm shift. Woody recently released Noun Sounds, a Nouns DAO project and music platform focused on providing free-to-use music for creators. He’s already released dozens of his own tracks on the platform for free use, leveraging CC0 – the most open Creative Commons license, allowing creators to waive all copyright and related rights, making the music available to the public domain.

Why would one waive their rights, you might ask. Well, conceivably the blockchain can complement the objectives of Creative Commons by providing a secure and transparent way to enforce and manage licensing agreements. For example, blockchain-based platforms can track the usage of Creative Commons-licensed content and automatically distribute royalties to creators. The art moves with ease, and value accrues via the art’s cultural impact. Provenance, enabled by the blockchain, ensures people know who created the art.

“This NFT is on the blockchain, so you can prove that you own the original,” Woody told me. “So if you encourage people to use it – ‘Hey, go remix this, use my loops, sample it, ect.’ – the proliferation or the marketing of those assets then adds value back to the original.”

In essence, it flips the copyright funnel on its head, and it’s a model that’s been used most prominently by Grimes. Alongside Jon Tanners’ CreateSafe, Grimes built and released Elf.Tech, a blockchain-connected platform that open sources the artist’s creative self. The artist promised to split 50 percent of her revenue with any “successful AI-generated song that uses [her] voice,” which makes her likeness memetic without sacrificing her own financial interests. It “works with the core mechanics of the Internet,” and creates precedent for other creators.

Folk Traditions

Perhaps now it’s clearer how the folk tradition fits squarely in the middle of this conversation. It’s a custom focused on collectively developed and shared intellectual property, as well as its preservation. The blockchain’s superpowers of immutability and decentralization make it a fitting technology for upholding that tradition.

The natural interplay between folk and permissionless blockchains was first introduced to me by Kyle Smith, a legal engineer, core member of LexDAO and founder of the W3M coalition, a group focused on creating legal standards for web3 music.

I met Smith through Kernel – a cohort-based web3 education program – when we rallied around related industry ills and helped conceive FOLK, a collective focused on tracing ancient folk relationships and methodologies to embed them into a new commons infrastructure.

The project stands on the shoulders of Creative Commons and various blockchain pioneers, and it celebrates folk traditions and the symbolism of cultural anthropophagy. Music is far from the only such tradition, but “music” and “folk” maintain a particularly longstanding cultural association.

Think of the songs you know for no good reason – “London Bridge is Falling Down,” “Home on the Range,” “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” – the ones that have emerged through collective context, lying there latent on the sidewalk, waiting to be hummed into existence as you pass by.

Folks like Woody Guthrie, Odetta and Pete Seeger famously brought a name to some of this music, covering and recording notable songs that belong to the public domain – like “We Shall Overcome,” a gospel song turned protest anthem for the American civil rights movement that’s thought to be lyrically descended from Charles Albert Tindley’s 1901 hymn, "I'll Overcome Some Day."

Embedded with cultural meaning and defined by a loose and varied attribution, the song typifies what we mean when we say folk music. Bob Dylan emerged from that spirit, famously emulating Guthrie and writing hundreds of songs that have been canonized in their own right.

But Dylan’s music is privately owned – despite Dylan’s reliance on folk’s public tradition. Again, over the past two years, Universal and Sony music groups bought his song catalog and recorded music rights for an estimated $600 million (and at one point they were reportedly working collectively to release Dylan’s NFTs on Snowcrash, an NFT platform co-founded by his son, Jesse Dylan). That wealth should not only belong to him.

And though he’s not at fault for the existence of copyright, his life and wealth are an ideal lens into why we should resurrect folk values – to unearth them from the faraway fields of Northern Minnesota in which they were buried.

Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan – then still Robert Zimmerman – was born into a middle class Jewish family in Hibbing, Minnesota, about 300 miles up I-35 from where I grew up. His father ran a furniture and appliance business and his mom had a clerical gig at a department store. They lived in a tan stucco two-story house. By all accounts he had a normal, comfortable life, but Dylan resented that normalcy, so he learned how to emulate other ways of being.

“He had an incredible ability to take things in and absorb them and turn around and put them right back out there,” “Spider” John Koerner – whom Dylan knew while attending the University of Minnesota – is quoted saying in David Hajdu’s Positively Fourth Street.

Hajdu wrote, “Part of folk’s appeal, particularly to young adults in the 1950s, was its antihero mythos – a sense of the music as the property of outcasts.”

The antihero proved to be the perfect disguise for Dylan’s discontent, and when donning the suit he looked toward his idol: Woody Guthrie. “In Guthrie,” Hajdu wrote, “Bob found more than a genre of music, a body of work, or a performance style: he found an image – the hard travelin’ loner with a guitar and a way with words, the outsider the insiders envied, easy with women, and surely doomed.”

That image – famously encapsulated in the juxtaposition of Guthrie’s acoustic music and the “this machine kills fascists” precept plastered to the guitar that made it – inspired Dylan to hit the road. He dropped out of college, deriding the phenomenon as a “cop-out from experience” before eventually settling into a life in New York City’s Greenwich Village.

While there, Dylan famously visited Guthrie in the hospital, and “the more time he spent with Guthrie, the more the acolyte seemed to resemble the debilitated master,” Hajdu observed through his research. Dylan’s hospital visits are oft-used fodder for his mythos-building, but it’s lesser known that he was far from the only one visiting him. Hajdu notes that another group of folksingers had been making the pilgrimage to see Guthrie for years before Dylan did it – just one of many glossed over details of a thoroughly practiced legend.

“He came on my radio show and said nothing but lies about his life,” said folk singer, songwriter and radio host Oscar Brand in Hajdu’s book. “He was afraid he couldn’t compete and afraid he wasn’t good enough, so he lied, and that made him afraid he would be caught and we would judge him.”

Hajdu details several instances in which Dylan used artifice as an escape hatch from normalcy to notability, reportedly using people like Joan and Mimi Baez as rungs on his ladder to fame. And there have been many human-shaped rungs over the years.

Dylan famously recorded his fellow Greenwich Village compadre Dave Van Ronk’s arrangement of “House of the Rising Sun” without permission, featuring it on his first record weeks before Van Ronk was going to record it himself. (Van Ronk partly inspired the titular character in the Coen Brothers’ film Inside Llewyn Davis).

Then there’s this old spiritual, “No More Auction Block for Me,” which likely provided the melodic contours of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” And there’s Fred Bals’ forensic analysis of Dylan’s repeated failure to credit Billie “The Kid” Emerson.

There’s also the 1960 track “Who’s Gonna Buy You Ribbons” by Paul Clayon, a contemporary of Dylan. Give it a listen and you’ll hear the melody line for Dylan’s 1962 classic, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.”

“By definition, folk music encouraged an element of borrowing from sources to preserve its traditional flavor,” wrote journalist Bob Spitz in his 1988 Dylan biography. “But Bob not only ignored his debt to Clayton’s composition; he copyrighted the tune in his own name without acknowledging its origins.”

Clayton’s song itself was inspired by an old folk song called “Who's Gonna Buy Your Chickens,” which may have first been titled "Who's Gon Bring You Chickens," a song published in the 1923 collection, Eight Negro Songs. The whole garbled lineage is a ringing example of copyright’s shortcomings. It prejudices us against a less documented past, crowning false prophets whose talent and guile are confused for genius.

There’s even an entire Wikipedia page called “Bob Dylan songs based on earlier tunes,” dedicated to the 32 Dylan tracks that have been traced to other origins. Dylan copyrighted all of them.

While much of this kind of conduct has done little to affect his status – you may have heard he won the Nobel Prize in 2016 – it also hasn’t gone wholly unnoticed. In a now infamous Joni Mitchell interview with the LA Times in 2010, the singer-songwriter expressed her own skepticism about Dylan's authenticity, saying: “Bob is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I.”

Accusations like these aren’t unique either. And in a 2012 interview with Rolling Stone, when confronted with charges of plagiarism, Dylan called critics “wussies and pussies” and claimed it was “part of the folk tradition.”

His outsized financial gain, though, undermines his supposed reverence for the folk tradition. It bears repeating: Dylan took the folk idiom, recreated it in his own image and then refused to abide by it.

Today we have an opportunity to shift that balance. Amidst the music industry’s stalwart, labyrinthine legal frameworks, the forgotten folk spirit and the Promethean mindset of web3, there’s an oasis of possibility. This experiment is being conducted in that oasis, where I proceeded with two two goals: first, develop a legal roadmap for minting a Bob Dylan cover on the blockchain. And second, use the blockchain to reallocate wealth from a folk to the folk.

The Legal Playbook

To kick things off, I went back to legacy protocols. Remember that each song has two distinct pieces of copyright, one for the composition and one for the recording. I’m only using the composition’s copyright – as the recording is my own – so I only need to obtain those rights.

The two primary stakeholders of the composition’s copyright are typically the composer and the publisher – in this case Bob Dylan and UMG, respectively (although only the latter owns the rights now) – but covers are interesting because they resemble the permissionless nature of public blockchains. They still require that I secure a license, but that can be done through the statutory regime instead of the rightsholder. As long as I comply with the guidelines of that regime, neither Bob Dylan nor UMG can deny me that permission – hence the permissionless. That’s because there are stipulations in US copyright law that say that once music has been publicly distributed in the United States with the copyright owner’s consent, anyone can obtain a compulsory mechanical license “without express permission from the copyright owner.”

To put it plainly, I don’t need Bob Dylan or UMG to sign off on my cover – I just need to obtain a mechanical license, which allows me to reproduce and distribute a copyrighted musical composition. Off-chain, that simply involves notifying the owner (UMG) and then paying the standard royalty rate of 9.1 cents per copy (the going rate in the US).

It’s worth noting that what’s technically illegal and what’s enforced are two different things. The vast majority of people uploading covers to YouTube, for instance, aren’t getting mechanical licenses – even though YouTube puts the impetus of having the correct licenses on the uploading party, writing in their terms and services: “The Content you submit must not include third-party intellectual property (such as copyrighted material) unless you have permission from that party or are otherwise legally entitled to do so."

NFT platforms largely rely on that same caveat, but NFTs’ provenance creates an additional wrinkle in the question of licensing. Remember, once on the blockchain, always on the blockchain (until the blockchain itself ceases to exist).

“The real problem there is the immutability in an infringement situation,” said lawyer Ash Kernen, who focuses on the intersection of culture and the blockchain. He told me that, in an environment where the classification of music NFTs are still being hotly debated, getting catch-all permission directly from the owner is the safest bet, and while it’s tempting to simply follow the traditional route and get a compulsory license, it may turn out to be more complicated than that.

Typically, the digital service providers (DSPs, like Spotify) are responsible for paying the mechanicals, but “whether it’s Arweave, OpenSea, aggregators, and the interplanetary file system (IPFS) – wherever you might stream or access this [NFT] – royalties are likely not being paid... And that's where the rubber meets the road.”

It’s those superpowers again: decentralization and immutability. One can’t simply reckon with violations by forcing a YouTube-like platform to take down infringing content, and it’s very difficult to determine who should pay royalties for accessing the content that isn’t in infringement. Via an aggregator like OpenSea or the decentralized storage itself (e.g. Arweave or IPFS, as Kernen mentions) – anyone can ostensibly access the file for as long as the blockchain exists. It’s a powerful archival mechanism, but – again – tough to reconcile with legacy copyright. And diving deeper into the technology reveals even more complexity.

“What actually is an NFT?” Kernen mused. “How they're stored matters. Where they're stored, how they're accessed matters,” he said, speaking to the sundry ways NFTs can exist. Storing on Arweave is different from storing on the IPFS. Accessing NFTs through OpenSea versus the platform on which the NFT is minted can yield different modes of interaction, which affects how music consumption is categorized and compensated. Public performances, for instance, are paid out differently and licensed differently than on-demand streaming.

“In addition to implicating the reproduction right, with anyone being able to stream an NFT given its public accessibility, at the same time, you're creating public performances in an on-demand situation. But given the decentralization, who is responsible for licensing and paying for that public performance?” Kernen continued. “These are all very complex and complicated issues, even for lawyers such as myself who deal regularly with these issues.”

If NFTs are also considered public performances, that would trigger the need for an additional public performance license, which are handled by performance rights organizations (PROs) and generally sought by venues, not individuals (though individuals, too, are entitled to public performance licenses through the PROs). It’s arguable that performance fees are the responsibility of the parties decrypting the NFT and hosting it for the end consumer to play, but that remains a point of contention. Whether an NFT necessitates the public performance license remains to be seen, and platforms like Unchained Music, which offers free digital music distribution (powered by AI and web3), aren’t currently requiring them for music NFTs.

“We haven't had anyone coming through our platform that sits squarely in the desired use case that we're talking about,” said Unchained Music’s CEO, Matt Waters, when I shared this experiment with him. “However, we're currently treating NFTs exactly like distribution to DSPs, except the distributing party is distributing to a 'global' DSP. We feel that this is an appropriate way to approach this without incurring the wrath of the powers that be until clearer guidance is issued in some form."

Basically, even though borrowing some nuts and bolts from legacy protocols is a simplistic solution for NFTs, it’s the best we’ve got for now – at least until that “clearer guidance” comes down the pike.

That in mind, I moved forward with acquiring just the standard compulsory mechanical license, using Songfile – a licensing product from the Harry Fox Agency – to acquire a license for Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country” (which also sufficiently satisfies the condition for notifying the owner).

A prerequisite of the license is that I estimate the numbers of digital downloads or number of pressings. In this instance, I based that number on total NFTs available in the edition, since there won’t technically be any downloads or physical copies. I went with 595 digital downloads for a total of 595 NFTs.

In this way, the release is comparable to an on-chain CD. It's an initial print, limited to a certain number of copies in the same way CDs are limited in their stock. And the 595 NFTs available in this first print reflect the 595 copies I've licensed.

It’s also a reference to the approximately each million Dylan made from selling his songwriting catalog and his recorded song rights. It’s also an homage to Sakamoto’s 595 NFTs project, which was largely misunderstood and panned due to environmental concerns and “an uncharacteristic capitulation to capitalism.”

Sakamoto, though, calculated and offset all the carbon costs of minting – and indeed he has a lengthy history of offsetting his own footprint, from deploying solar panels during his tours to using eco-friendly paper packaging for his albums (since 1994!) to converting his own home to 100% reliance on wind energy. He also conducted the on-chain project in the spirit of gathering.

“Similar to how each individual note in a composition comes together to create a greater whole,” Sakamoto wrote in a project retrospective. “I imagined that digitized notes could bring each individual NFT holder together as part of a larger and more harmonious community.”

“To my dismay,” he continued, “the project also attracted considerable attention from investors more interested in money than music. I certainly did not expect that my music would become an object of financial speculation.”

Speculation is perhaps the very root of the hype, the stigma and the overfinancialization of NFTs. So while making this Dylan NFT available for free could help mitigate speculation – though not wholly, given the license-induced scarcity – recall that my intention is to explore the idea of selling them to redistribute wealth from a folk to the folk.

When I asked Kernen how monetizing the NFT might affect the experiment, he said, “[Whether it makes money] has no bearing on the infringement analysis. If it was a fair use situation” – i.e. the right to use a copyrighted work under certain conditions without permission – “and you were doing it for commentary purposes or something like that, that's a different conversation, but it’s very fact-specific and people are way too quick to rely on fair use when it really has nothing to do with the actual use at hand.”

One of the fair use conditions is cultural commentary, which brings us back to Bob Dylan and the dissonance between folk and copyright. Again, if I weren’t minting this song on the blockchain and thus tapping into all the aforementioned complexities, I wouldn’t need any permission aside from the compulsory license – and I still may not. But as we now know, the blockchain introduces much uncertainty, so I’ve accounted for that by rooting this experiment in that dissonance, exemplified by Dylan’s folk facade – his “artifice in the name of truth and authenticity” – and the wealth and cultural cache he accumulated not just through his talent, but by taking advantage of the legal – but inequitable – regime of copyright.

Girl From the North Country

And yet we all contain multitudes. Dylan profited unfairly from his art, but his art has also borne such beauty into the world, and we need to hold both truths.

I have certainly been touched by that beauty, most notably by Dylan’s song, “Girl from the North Country.” Like many of his songs, its origins lie in the hearts of other people. The piece’s melody and lyrics were inspired by this rendition of the traditional ballad “Scarborough Fair” performed by English musician, Martin Carthy, whom Dylan visited in England. And musically, it’s nearly identical to Dylan’s song, “Boots of Spanish Leather,” which he recorded just four months after “Girl from the North Country.”

My connection to it is through – what else – love. About seven years ago, in the early days of our relationship, I learned that “Girl from the North Country” was my partner’s favorite Dylan song. She and I were living in different countries at the time, so I recorded a cover of the piece in my bedroom in Brooklyn and sent it as my first birthday gift to her. It was a connective moment that Dylan indirectly facilitated, and so I owe the song – and him (and Carthy and undoubtedly many others) – a debt. That’s the power of sharing music, and we should ease its transmission.

Minting this cover, then, is not simply a commentary on copyright and a proposed elevation of folk methodologies (although it is both those things) – it’s also an invitation to Dylan to be involved in the work that we’re doing, to put his money where his mouth is and advocate for systems that are actually “part of the folk tradition,” because today, they decidedly are not.

So, in the spirit of giving back, this experiment is being conducted alongside the FOLK collective to redistribute the wealth. The 595 editions of the music NFT will be minted on Optimism via Zora, to use the blockchain – and music illogically copyrighted to only Bob Dylan – to reroute funds to folk communities that reference the folk traditions from which the music was born.

When it came to pricing, we felt that the most folkish approach was to use a pay-what-you-can formula, but unfortunately that’s not a feature that any minting platforms (that we know of) offer. To emulate the effect, we’re minting three versions of the NFT at three different price points:

550 at .01 ETH

30 at .1 ETH

15 at 1 ETH

Check out the NFT FOLK: this machine kills copyright

Higher price points don’t come with additional utility because the goal is simply to accommodate people of varying means. We aren’t trying to attract attention from “investors more interested in money than music.”

Funds will be split between the FOLK treasury (50%) and the FOLK fund (50%), a cadre of mission-aligned partners whose work we care for and believe should be elevated.

The partners for this initial experiment are Akiya DAO, Genre DAO, Kernel, Songcamp and Water & Music, who will each receive 10%. The FOLK treasury’s 50% will be used to cover administrative costs and to support subsequent experiments, artists and stewards who are caring for our world and our histories.

I’m Not There

In the 2007 film I’m Not There, director Todd Haynes cast six actors to play Dylan at various points in his life. “These Bob Dylans are not, at base, disparate or separate characters,” writes Dylan scholar Michael Gray of the film, “but differing stages in the growth of a man and in the ebbs and flows of a great artist.”

The various shapes and forms nod to the reinvention – both musical and personal – that has been central to Dylan’s life. And remember, “transformation has always been part of the American idea.” The fact that “anyone can become a new person” speaks to the dynamism of life. Ideas, art and identities are temporary artifacts of an interdependent reality. They aren’t “fixed,” and shouldn’t be ownable – at least not by a single person.

As a massive stretch goal, FOLK has a mostly playful, mildly serious interest in buying Bob Dylan’s house in Scotland – which has been up for sale all summer – to turn it into a home for artist and steward residencies, collectively owned and cared for by all of the FOLK.

It’s in these gathering spaces that ideas gain new heights. Digitally, each of the FOLK fund partners have elevated their mission through this gathering, and the same is true for FOLK itself. Incorporating physical spaces will allow us to elevate even further. It counters the sterile accumulation of wealth that often leads to underused space – like Dylan’s Scottish mansion – and invokes the Greenwich Village scene from which Dylan emerged.

Imagine the young Dylan sleeping on couches and in cafes, constantly confronted by the beating heart of a folk zeitgeist and a global nexus of inspirators. That was his deluge, the flesh of others he readily devoured until what came back out felt right.

In one such place, Dylan met the artist Suze Rotolo. They started dating, and she featured on the cover of his second studio album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (she’s also likely the “girl” in “Girl from the North Country”). Rotolo notably introduced Dylan to the work of French philosopher Arthur Rimbaud.

“I came across one of his letters called ‘Je est un autre,’ which translates into ‘I is someone else,’” Dylan wrote in his memoir, Chronicles. “When I read those words the bells went off. It made perfect sense. I wished someone would have mentioned that to me earlier.”

Rimbaud is one of the six Dylan characters – played by Ben Whishaw – in I’m Not There. In one scene, Whishaw recites Dylan’s “seven simple rules for life in hiding.” Numbers four and five are “never give your real name” and “if ever told to look at yourself, never look.”

In Dylan’s slippery figure, there’s a more fundamental grappling we’ll all recognize: amidst a world of continuous change, of untold ideas and people and noises all tugging at us from different directions, what does it mean to live authentically? Who is the “I” – or “someone else” – that is or isn’t there?

The answer is evasive, and relevant quotes are used as a recurring motif in the film. “I wake and I'm one person, when I go to sleep I know for certain I'm somebody else,” said the ‘Billy the Kid’ Dylan character, played by Richard Gere. “I don't know who I am most of the time.”

Dylan is hardly alone in that quandary – we all know the hardship of looking in the mirror, of those “God, I’m glad I’m not me” moments (voiced by Dylan’s ‘Jude’ character, played by Cate Blanchett).

And as we judge Dylan from afar, doubt his folkish soul and scour his enigma for evidence of genius and hope, perhaps it’s that wry shrug of self that houses the real Dylan. “Never create anything,” Whishaw (as Rimbaud) says, reciting Dylan’s final rule for a life in hiding. “It will be misinterpreted, it will chain you and follow you for the rest of your life.”

Here we are doing just that, chaining creations to a man who has admitted time and again that he is someone else. Perhaps Dylan – perhaps all of us – are nowhere to be found. Just some folk, trying to find our way, taking solace in one simple Dylanism that’s followed him through his life:

"All I can do is be me,” he once said, “whoever that is."