Universal Guaranteed Media Access May Help Us Achieve A Universal Guaranteed Income

I was thinking about the Pirate Party’s position on making digital media available to everyone and it occurred to me that this goal may be achievable without ignoring copyright laws or giving everything away for free.

Perhaps it would be possible to partner with media distributors, authors, artists and musicians to create a special blockchain based cryptocurrency that can be redeemed for access to digital content like books, movies, tv shows, music, and games. In order to make the access universal, each month the cryptocurrency could be issued to anyone on the planet who wishes to redeem it within so many days after its issuance. After these free tokens were used, individuals could continue to access digital content by purchasing additional tokens that could also be redeemed for temporary or permanent access to any content hosted by the system.

In order to incentivize participation, the system could serve the content by distributing it across the machines of participants who can earn tokens for any hosting they provide (a variation on IPFS?). This could significantly lower the cost for bandwidth and server infrastructure for a media distributor such as Amazon, Spotify, or Netflix.

Interestingly, the process of working out the technical and economic problems associated with what I’m calling Universal Guaranteed Media Access (UGMA), may help us solve the problems that must be solved in order to provide a Universal Guaranteed Income (UGI) to every human on the planet!