Tensorial Rights Framework
17-page PDF · not legal advice
A 17-page paper on how to model who owns what in a remix, and how each original's terms carry into every remix made from it.
The paper starts with a chain of licenses. A producer, Aria in the paper, makes a beat, and a vocalist licenses it for a track. A DJ, DJ Destiny, remixes that track with vocals that came through a separate license chain. Then a film studio wants the remix for a trailer, in the US only, for six months. It asks whether the studio can use it, and who gets paid.
Now say the producer's license banned alcohol ads, and the DJ's license never mentioned it. The ban still applies, so the studio can't put the remix in a beer commercial. The model in the paper carries the ban down the chain to the studio and flags the ad.
From a grid to layers
The model starts as a grid. One side lists rights, such as record, reproduce and modify. The other lists terms, such as time and territory. Each cell holds a rule that says whether an action is allowed.
That works for one license. It stops working as soon as someone builds on the work, because a grid can say what you may do with a work but not how those rights change inside your remix. So the paper stacks the grids into layers, like sieves, and an action gets through only if every filter it meets allows it. Tensor is the math word for a grid with more than two axes. That's where the title comes from, and honestly it sounds harder than the idea is.
Propagation rules then decide what each remix inherits from the works above it:
- A ban like "no hate speech" passes through every remix, and every remix of a remix, unchanged.
- Territories intersect. If one source allows North America and another allows the US and Mexico, the remix gets the US and Mexico.
- The shortest time limit wins.
- Exclusions pile up, so a "no political use" on one sample binds everything built on top of it.
So checking a license means checking the whole chain above it. The paper also maps legal grant types onto the model and works out what a check costs as chains grow. Once the rights above a work are computed and saved, a check costs the same however long the chain is.
The paper is a first version, and it hedges a lot. "Might" shows up 23 times in 17 pages, and section 2.6 says the math for checking remixes of remixes "is still under development." The conclusion says rights management "will always require human judgment for edge cases." I wrote the first code for the model with another engineer, and the team has extended it since.
Stack
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