Gathering Feedback: Dispute Module Improvements

Proposals
1

There are two improvements to the dispute module under consideration:

1) What happens if dispute initiator refuses to resolve?

Problem
Resolve is solely in the hands of the dispute initiator as-is. If dispute initiator maliciously does not want to resolve the dispute even after all efforts made by the other party to resolve, then the other party does not have any incentive to make an effort to resolve a dispute. The intended behaviour is to incentivize the infringing party to make efforts to make things right by the other party.

Solution
To create incentive for infringing parties to make efforts to make things right, a new dispute type could be created called “Force Resolve”:

  • what it does: forces the infringement tag to be removed and forcibly resolves a dispute - if the grievances have indeed been resolved (example of an untagging situation)
  • which dispute types: it can only be used on original disputes and not propagation disputes
  • how many times can it be used: the downside of creating a dispute for resolving disputes is that errors could happen and infringing IPs could be erroneously freed. To prevent infringement tagged IP owners from “rolling the dice”. In the event of an erroneously freed IP, a new regular dispute can be raised again to the same IP. The IP is permanently tagged the the “Force Resolve” dispute fails
  • who can trigger resolve dispute: only the IP owner of the IP that is tagged since there is only one attempt

2) What happens when more than one arbitration policy exists and are very different in judgement quality? Should we add the option of forcing all IPs in the same graph to be on the same arbitration policy for fairness? (ie. as a new licensing term)

Problem

  1. Remixing risk for descendants - Descendants think they are safe from dispute propagation risk but then root changes dispute policy to a low quality one and is tagged erroneously and the entire tree is tagged via propagation
  2. Revenue loss risk for ancestors - Descendants choose low quality arbitration policies and get tagged erroneously making ancestor lose money

Solution
Introduce a new option for IP owners to make called “enforce same arbitration policies”. A Allow parents to choose between two options before they have their first remix:

  1. Free choice at all times - Today users only have this option. Allows all IPs to change their arbitration policy at all times with a cooldown time.
  2. Enforce descendants arbitration policies - an IP can decide that it wants to always enforce a certain arbitration policy to its descendants - similar to how we do with royalty where entire graph is forced to have same royalty policy LRP or LAP. Once this choice is made then the IP itself makes its own arbitration policy immutable as well. This choice can be made at any time but is irreversible once made.

This is shared with the intent of hearing the community’s feedback and thoughts about this feature.

Thank you in advance!

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