[MINUTES] CCG Atlantic Weekly 2026-02-24

Meeting Summary: CCG Atlantic Weekly - 2026/02/24

This meeting focused on the application of Verifiable Credentials (VCs) and
Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) in the music rights management industry.
Cole Davis, founder and CEO of SwitchCord, presented his company's journey
and current offerings, highlighting the challenges of data inefficiency and
fraud in the music industry and how VCs and DIDs offer a solution.
Topics Covered:

   - *Introduction and Administrative Items:*
      - Welcome and brief overview of the call's purpose.
      - Reminder of W3C's Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.
      - IPR policy and participation guidelines.
      - Call recording and minute sharing information.
   - *Announcements and Reminders:*
      - *Verifiable Credentials Working Group Recharter:* A reminder that
      the voting period for the recharter closes this week.
      - *Verifiable Issuers and Verifiers Specification Renaming:* A
      heads-up that a request for name suggestions for this
specification will be
      sent out soon, followed by a ranked-choice poll.
   - *Work Item Updates:*
      - *HTML Render Method:* Significant progress has been made on a
      generalized mechanism for displaying VCs in web browsers and
mobile phones.
      - *Confidence Method Strategy:* Refactoring and understanding of this
      specification for cryptographic proof of subject identity are underway.
      - *Verifiable Issuers Specification:* Use cases have been identified,
      and the specification's functionality is being defined with an expected
      move to the standards track.
   - *DID Resolution Test Suite:* A call for implementers of DID resolution
   to submit conformant implementations to the test suite.
   - *Presentation: BIDs and VCs in Music Rights Management:*
      - *Industry Challenges:* The music industry faces significant
      inefficiencies in data transmission due to complex supply
chains, multiple
      data standards, and manual processes. This leads to mispayments and
      difficulties in tracking copyright ownership.
      - *SwitchCord's Solution:* SwitchCord aims to automate data flow by
      transforming legal contracts into verifiable credentials. DIDs
are used in
      the background to identify participants.
      - *Credential Issuance Workflow:* A demonstration showcased how music
      publishing agreements can be ingested, key fields extracted, and a
      verifiable credential issued to the songwriter, creating a
      cryptographically verified representation of the contractual
relationship.
      - *DID for Compositions:* The creation of a DID representing a
      musical composition, derived from its governing legal contracts, was
      highlighted as a way to establish a trusted chain of title and ownership.
      - *Pivot to Legal Tech:* Due to market adoption challenges for pure
      identity solutions, SwitchCord has pivoted to focus on contract data
      extraction and diligence, particularly for catalog acquisitions, while
      still leveraging the underlying identity and VC principles.
      - *AI's Role:* AI and large language models (LLMs) are crucial for
      extracting structured data from unstructured legal contracts and are
      expected to drive standardization and interoperability in the legal tech
      space.
      - *Agentic Commerce:* The potential for AI agents to act on behalf of
      individuals and enterprises, and the importance of contract
credentials in
      proving their authority, was discussed.
   - *Community Discussion and Questions:*
      - *AI in Legal Contracts:* The ability of LLMs to extract data from
      contracts and pre-fill VCs was highlighted as a powerful pattern
applicable
      across industries.
      - *Customer Motivation for Structured Outputs:* The primary driver
      for customers is to populate their rights management systems for
licensing
      and monetization, not necessarily for predictive modeling.
      - *The Future of Contract Credentials:* The potential for all
      contracts to be transformed into verifiable credentials to enable more
      transparent and efficient commerce was discussed.
      - *Ideal Specifications/Tools:* A need for more open-source tools and
      specifications in the legal identity space was expressed.

Key Points:

   - The music industry is plagued by data inefficiencies and fraud,
   leading to mispayments and complex rights management.
   - Verifiable Credentials and Decentralized Identifiers offer a robust
   solution for establishing trust and verifying legal relationships in this
   industry.
   - Transforming legal contracts into verifiable credentials creates a
   machine-readable, cryptographically secured representation of agreements.
   - AI and LLMs are instrumental in extracting structured data from
   unstructured legal documents, enabling the creation of these contract
   credentials.
   - While direct identity product adoption can be challenging, the
   underlying principles of VCs and DIDs are finding traction through legal
   tech applications that solve immediate business problems.
   - The concept of "agentic commerce," where AI agents act on behalf of
   participants, highlights the growing importance of verifiable credentials
   to prove authority and prevent disputes.
   - There is a recognized need for more standardized specifications and
   open-source tools to accelerate the adoption of identity and credentialing
   solutions in the legal sector.

Text:
https://meet.w3c-ccg.org/archives/w3c-ccg-ccg-atlantic-weekly-2026-02-24.md

Video:
https://meet.w3c-ccg.org/archives/w3c-ccg-ccg-atlantic-weekly-2026-02-24.mp4
*CCG Atlantic Weekly - 2026/02/24 11:56 EST - Transcript* *Attendees*

Alex Higuera, Benjamin Young, Cole Davis, Dmitri Zagidulin, Elaine Wooton,
Erica Connell, Gregory Natran, Harrison Tang, JeffO - HumanOS, Joe Andrieu,
Kayode Ezike, Mahmoud Alkhraishi, Manu Sporny, Parth Bhatt, Phillip Long,
Pierre-Antoine Champin, Rob Padula, TAG is I.T.!, Ted Thibodeau Jr, Will
Abramson
*Transcript*

Will Abramson: Jeff, Erica.

Erica Connell: Hey, hey, happy Tuesday.

Will Abramson: bear on. We'll give folks a few minutes. We still have call
here. He has told me he's coming.

Will Abramson: Hey, I see How's it Great. Hey, nice to see you. I don't
know if you want to just test your screen sharing or anything like that,
your audio. We'll get started in a couple of minutes. And you are on mute.
Yep.

Cole Davis: There you go. Cool. All right. Looks like that's working.

Will Abramson: That's it.

Cole Davis: Go.

Will Abramson: Yes. We'll give people another couple of minutes. I'll do
the admin stuff and I'll hand it over to you.

Will Abramson: Okay, I think I'll get things started. so welcome everyone
to today's credentials community group call. Today we've got gold Davis on.
It's going to present to us about bids and VCs in music rights management.
Before I get into all that, let me just go through the admin stuff at the
start of the call. So, a reminder to everyone that all the W3C's code of
ethics and professional conduct. if you haven't read it recently, do take a
little look through, but think in general, we do a great job of that. I've
seen some things on the mailing list, maybe about AI use and stuff like
that.

Will Abramson: some things that we'll think through but I think in general
we do a great job as a community to make it a welcoming friendly space so
let's continue to do that next IP note anyone's welcome to participate in
these calls however substantiative contributors to any CCG work items must
be members of the CCG this full IPR agreement signed do reach out to me
Mimmude or Denin if you have any questions we'll be happy to help Next call
notes. So these calls are recorded and the minutes are shared to the W3C
mailing list within 24 hours. they're subscribed by Google's AI system. So
yeah, watch out for that if you want the recording or the minutes. Next,
introductions, reintroductions.
00:05:00

Will Abramson: There's anyone new to these calls who would like to
introduce themselves to the community or maybe they haven't been here for a
while and just want to say hello, feel free to jump on the queue and say
hi. Okay, not seeing anyone on the queue. We'll move on. announcements and
reminders. Does anybody have any announcements or reminders they want to
share with the community today? Man, yeah,…

Manu Sporny: Yeah, a couple of quick ones.

Will Abramson: go for

Manu Sporny: So this is the last week for the new verifiable credentials
working group recharter that has been out for vote for almost a month now.
we have a very good healthy response to the charter. So, it's looking
really good right now. we can't talk about specifics since it's member
only, but if you know of a W3C member that has not voted for the new VC
working group charter, please prod them this week. They need to get their
votes in by the end of this week. for it to count.

Manu Sporny: So, we're in really good shape, but hey, more votes the
better. it helps signal to a W3C membership that, people are interested in
this work. thats the second item is, as everyone knows, this community
absolutely loves naming things, which is among the hardest thing, to do.
And we need to rename the verifiable issuers and verifiers specification.
We have a pretty good idea of what the specification does now. this is just
a heads up that we're going to be sending out a request for suggested names
from the community and then we'll do our standard rank choice poll to try
and gather more data about what we should name the specification.

Manu Sporny: What we're trying to do is pick a name that resonates with
people outside of the community and tells people kind of what the thing
does by just, reading the title of the specification. so that I'm hoping to
get out this week next week.

Manu Sporny: And that's about it.

Will Abramson: Great. Thanks,…

Will Abramson: Manny. Appreciate that. Anyone else? Final call for
announcements, reminders or any work item updates? I guess the verifiable
issue is verifiers as a work item update. I know.

Manu Sporny: Yeah, the work item updates. so the good news here is that I
think we have made significant progress on the HTML render method as a
generalized mechanism for how do you display a verifiable credential to
someone if they're on a web browser or mobile phone. so the verifiable
credential working group render method thanks to the Benjamin and Dave
Longley, put together good proposal that's in there now. pay attention to
that because that is probably going to be the thing that is at least one of
the things that's standardized.

Manu Sporny: the other work item that we've made good progress on I think
is just the strategy around confidence method. so I think Joe's been doing
some great work and Denin have been doing some great work about kind of
refactoring that understanding what that specification is about. That's
about proving cryptographically that you're the subject as one of the use
cases there.

Manu Sporny: And then the third thing that we've made really good progress
on over the past two months is the u soon to be renamed verifiable in
issuers specification. We have gotten all the use cases figured out from
kind of like what does the specification look like perspective. So within
the next let's say week or so we will have a good kind of like this is what
the specification is going to do. and that work is expected to go into the
standards track as well. So, we're making really good progress in these
variety of different work item meetings. and people should pay particular
attention to those specifications because we're pretty sure we've got the
foundation laid and we're going to start building on top of it.
00:10:00

Manu Sporny: So, if you've got thoughts or…

Manu Sporny: hopes, now's the time to get them in before we really get
those specs dialed in.

Will Abramson: Great. Thanks,…

Will Abramson: That actually reminded me of something else I've been said
doing recently. I've been im trying to implement a start of the DID
resolution test suite for the DID working group, which hopefully we'll be
wrapping up later this year. If anyone on this call knows or is an
implementer of DID resolution, if they have a DID method that implements
resolve and are interested in submitting a conformant implementation to DID
resolution test suite, I would love to talk to you. even if you just have a
library, right, it shouldn't be too hard to get it integrated. it would be
great to see some implementations. Thank you.

Will Abramson: okay with that I think that's it I can hand over to you call
and thanks for coming on looking forward to this

Cole Davis: Thanks for Let me get in this little demo fixed up. I haven't
run this one in quite a while. So, let me see All nice to meet all of you.
I know I'm looking through the names and I know a lot of you from just the
community and IW and just sort of being involved in the W3C and the Didden
VC world. so I'm Cole Davis, founder and CEO of SwitchCord. We are a legal
technology and digital identity company. lately a lot more on the legal
technology just the way the product has rolled out and been adopted by our
early customers.

Cole Davis: a little less on the identity front, but it's still there in
the background. And I can kind of show you that sorry, I hear my dog
barking. so what we do is here. I've got a presentation from a previous
webinar last year I can show. All right. so the music industry it's just a
lot of really inefficient data so the way it works is you have songwriters
who write songs often called music compositions. You have recording artists
who make recordings of those songs. technically two separate copyrights.

Cole Davis: all the information about that music has to be transmitted
throughout the supply chain and the supply chain is a very complex web of
different data standards, different rights management systems, database
schema. So it's a bit of a mess. There's a lot of manual email, text, phone
calls, not as much fax anymore, but it used to be facts till relatively
recently. And as a music lawyer years ago, I just thought it was kind of
insane that this is how we send data around the industry. And the main
thing that I was frustrated with is why can't we just go directly from a
legal contract into a database? it's just layers of people looking at
contracts and manually entering information about the contracts into a
database schema and then emailing that Excel spreadsheet to someone else to
do the exact same thing.

Cole Davis: so this is 2016 and I started thinking there's got to be a
better way to do this. we don't really need to get into this, but what
happens is when you have bad metadata, it means people don't get paid. so,
gosh, I might have to go grab my multiple songwriters will write a song.
So, let's say you got four songwriters, okay, they write a song. You got to
figure out who owns the song. Is it 25% each? so it's really complex and
there's often samples that can bring in more ownership splits. And so a
composition written by the songwriters may ultimately be owned by 10 to 20
different entities because The songwriter is usually signed quote unquote
to a music publisher. That's who goes out and makes the writer money. We
have split ownership between them. So it quickly spirals out of control.

Cole Davis: And then for people in the supply chain wanting to use that
composition, put it in a movie or put it in a video game or make a
recording of it, it's really hard to track down who owns that song and then
to obtain the rights through a license. So this is kind of like that mess
of getting data and then you have to run it through all these different
rights management systems that are used and royalty processing systems that
are used throughout the industry. Some of these are government sponsored.
Some of them are private. Some of them are kind of quasi government
entities. there's a lot of antitrust problems in the music industry because
there's so much consolidation and blanket licensing of copyrights which
acts as a copyright pool which is technically illegal. So it's a very
highly regulated mess of an industry and I set out to sort of automate that
process.
00:15:00

Cole Davis: This just shows lots of different databases showing who has the
right to do what. They're usually inconsistent. so I set out years ago to
create what we sometimes call trusted data, which is basically let's take
all the identity information about the actors in this system. So a
songwriter has all of these different identifiers that mean different
things for different parts of the system. Some of them are like ISO
standards, some of them are government. you've got the same thing for music
companies in the S3. These are all different identifiers that they have for
different parts of the supply chain. And then a copyright itself has
different identifiers for different parts of the supply chain. then there
are compositions and sound recordings which have different copyrights.

Cole Davis: And because the identifiers are sort of broken apart from the
legal workflows, people later have to recreate it and it leads to ISWC is
an ISO standard that it represents the composition across the world of
music. An ISRC represents a specific recording of a composition because you
can have different cover recordings. So let's say three bands cover the
same song, those three recordings will have different ISRC's. So all these
things have to get populated in all these different databases. So in
Spotify and YouTube and everything you can imagine needs these identifiers
because that's how payment gets tracked and paid. And so what we set out to
solve This is every single contract in the industry. it's a giant supply
chain where you have raw materials here with songwriters and recording
artists.

Cole Davis: It gets pursuant to a series of contracts turned into a product
here which is compositions and then recordings and any product it then has
to be distributed through distributors to retailers. And so we mapped kind
of all these contracts so that we could effectively turn them into
credentials because what we wanted is for systems to be able to send each
other data. even though they use different database schema, they'd be able
to send these credentials and extract the verified data that came directly
from the contracts. That way we can send data around the industry faster
and with cryptographic verification. So this is kind of how I view the
world these days after doing this for many many years of my professional
life. in theory legal and identity are separate but in reality They're
bound up.

Cole Davis: It's are who you say you are? Can you do what you say you can
do? And those both have this weird knot of identity and legal aspects to so
that's basically it. Are you say you are your music identity? All those
identifiers can you do what you say you can do which usually stems from a
contract. Sometimes it stems from the constitution or from statutes like
the copyright act under the constitution or regulations adopted by the
copyright office under statute. But for a lot of this the way the music
industry works you can trace it back to a contract. So my goal through lots
of years of research was okay how can we figure out how to extract model
and extract the legal relationships in a contract exported in a fashion
that can be used to prove contractual authority to any part of a supply
chain whether it's a human a software system.

Cole Davis: so that's what we built at switch cord and the first way to
apply that was right here just talking to some of our early customers
prospect customers and my friends in the industry is songwriters sending
data to music publishers. So you have songwriters here four of them write a
song they have to agree on who owns what. So is it 25% each? Is it% to one
10% to the other? Is it 100% to one? that information about the composition
as well as the co-writers has to be sent to a music publisher in order for
them to then go monetize it, meaning get it recorded by a recording artist,
get it placed into a film. And so there's all that data I showed you, those
iiers All the ownership splits have to be sent. Things like lyrics, the
relationships between the other songwriters on the song and their music
publishers have to be sent.

Cole Davis: So, it's a ton of data and it currently is currently sent by
text message or email. So, we built a way to automate that data flow from
writers to publishers as sort of like, hey, let's give it a shot. this is a
mess. Maybe we start there and with the ultimate goal of that data can then
sort of populate these different systems so we could translate the schema
on the fly. this is just a embodiment of let's turn legal contracts into
secure messengers that can deliver data to systems and that's what I will
show you today. oddly enough this platform is kind of on pause while our
customers have taken it a different direction so I can show you what that
looks like.
00:20:00

Cole Davis: so it is a two-sided techally multi-sided marketplace where you
have creators, so songwriters or music producers over here and then you
have music publishers or what are known as administrators over here and so
writers have to get information to the publishers and we want to make it as
fast and easy for all parties involved as possible. So what we did is on
both sides you have dids in the background. So we just for our basic get it
off the ground. We have a did web s implementation that uses the didd web s
spec and carry and so it can map to an aid from a did. So we wanted it to
be we can get into that discussion another time. so this is kind of what
this identity looks like for coal. That's my did web did. I can put in a
universal resolver.

Cole Davis: I can resolve that thing. And then we pull information related
to my account. And the publishers have it. It's in the background. You
can't see it. And so what happens is the writer has this identity. We've
got, some identity verification through Stripe. You can have different
personas because maybe you're acting as a producer one day and a writer
another day. And we always want to model the legal relationships correctly
based on how you're acting because you can have different legal contractual
relationships with different publishers or recording companies depending on
what you're doing. And so that's the Publisher side over here you got a
dashboard all your compositions that so once your writers are connected via
a verifiable credential that I'll show you in a second. Stuff they do over
here just starts to flow in instantly. And then from here you can push it
into your rights management system. So we act

Cole Davis: switch cord is meant to be a switchboard for data and we can
push from here. our writers show up here. These are active writers that
have credentials. So, to show you what that looks like, I will invite Cole.
And where did I put my contract that I was going to show you? here it is.
All right. So, this is our credential issuance workflow. I'm going to drag
and drop a music contract. This is a music publishing agreement that looks
like this. So, here's me, the writer. this is a quirk in the music
industry. I own my own publishing company. And then this is a publishing
agreement, meaning I will sell half of the copyright of my songs to a
publisher and then I will keep half of the copyright to myself.

Cole Davis: just a quirk in the industry on negotiating leverage. if I can
command that. So I can drop that in. We then extract the relevant fields
that are important ential for the workflow. So it's the term of the
agreement, how many songs Cole needs to write. let's see. Okay, so it
extracted this information. then I should show up automatically.

Cole Davis: Okay, there's me. I'm already a user, so as a publisher, I can
click submit. So then we get to see what fields it extracted. So the term
of the agreement was from December 25. It's a one-year term. So that. Cole
is a member of ASCAP. We don't need to worry about what that means. Cole's
going to hold back 50% ownership. It's worldwide territory for
administration rights. Here's Cole's publisher. Here is he needs to deliver
eight works. So what we just did is this is the schema that's going to
populate the W3C VC data model. We are then going to digitally sign out
with the publishers's private key and we're going to issue it to Cole. So
Cole now has this credential that came in and he can verify that yeah
that's my information. I can accept the credential.

Cole Davis: So now in my identity page, I've got this verified publishing
relationship with Steamroller, That's my publishing entity that owns 50%. I
know it's kind of hard to see. 50% there. I can actually see that
Steamroller themselves has an administrator and that has a credential in
the background. We won't worry about that. But we're sort of creating
chains of credentials to model the way it actually works in the music
industry.
00:25:00

Cole Davis: So this would be say I'm here. This is my songwrit agreement.
This is My publisher then has an administration agreement with another
publisher say for different territories. So we want to model all these
things so the data can flow correctly. and verifiable credentials VCs I
mean DIDs are great to do that. So now Cole's connected. If I on the writer
side create a new song. We'll call this the W3C song. and you can do this
on your phone. We have a mobile app that's in the works, but we actually
paused it because we're doing a lot of other work. I can pick the persona.
I can say that, let's just say I wrote this whole thing. I won't even do
the multiwriter workflow. So, I can come in here. I can drop in the demo
recordings, the lyrics. I can say whether I use samples, there's a sample
workflow.

Cole Davis: I won't do that because it takes a bit of time. But so
effectively we're documenting the song. if I invited another writer, we'd
have another writer who enters. They can sign the split sheet using the
did. This time we're just going to sign a single writer attestation and
sign and finalize it. So now if we look on the publishing side, we kind of
instantly see that the W3C song. We see Cole's verified information about
his publisher. obviously I didn't add a lot of the information that would
have shown up here but it's finalized. So what's cool is this creates
itself a did for that composition.

Cole Davis: And this is what I spent years and years figuring out is what I
wanted to do as a lawyer is for chain of title purposes. I wanted to create
a digital representation of this asset that's born directly from the legal
contracts that govern the asset because again I was so tired of people
having to manually enter information about a contract or about a thing into
a database and then we claim the database is what represents the asset. But
then you get multiple databases that are inconsistent. So now we don't have
a shared view of the state of the asset. So what this is is a view of the
asset that was born from the contract. So did that represents this
composition. we see that Cole is the writer. We see the owners are
Steamroller Publishing. There's a credential that represents that 50%. We
see that Cole owns 50%. All of these can be resolved.

Cole Davis: So, I can pull up Steamroller, this publisher right here. I can
check their did and I can learn more about them and I can click on, if I
had a co-writer, I could click on that did. I can click on Cole's writer
did and see information about him. And what we're doing is modeling these
relationships, whether it's ownership, whether it's administration. this is
actually pulling into the cryptographic controller field within this DID.
So these two entities are if we were to resolve this did which actually
let's do it let's see wc universal hey resolver which one will get it to me
you get the idea I could resolve it and it will show these two dids as the
controller within

Cole Davis: the did document and so yeah so we've got this identity that
represents the composition. We've now got on this side all the data from
this composition is now in structured data can be pushed into a rights
management system and it's great. It works really well. we have some early
users of the platform. But what's funny is you never really know how this
stuff's going to get adopted once it's out in the wild. And what started
happening is people started taking this contracts page and they saw that
you could drop in a contract through that credential workflow. We can
extract it. And so people started doing that just to extract data about the
contracts. And then they asked us, hey, can you just make a way to do that
same thing? Just drag and drop the contract and then extract information
about it and then show it to us.

Cole Davis: And so, we built that for the early users just to see how they
liked it and can you export it to air table? Can you export a CSV file? so
that then turned into we really really like this. could we do this at scale
with thousands of contracts? And we were like, yeah, that's not really what
we built the platform to do, but we can do that. So, that's what we've
spent the past six to seven months doing creating was effectively like a
catalog acquisition diligence platform because there's a lot of money
flowing into music to buy these copyrights because the royalty streams are
predictable. It's kind of like a bond. You can model what are called DK
curves over the years and so you can discount the value back and then buy
them. So to understand what you buy, you need to know the rights from the
contract.
00:30:00

Cole Davis: And we just happened to have already done this because we're
trying to turn all these contracts into credentials. And luckily, it's kind
of hard to make money using decentralized identity as products as many of
it's just hard. But people really want this. So that's what we've spent the
past seven months building is I give you just a quick sneak peek of that.
Some of this is a bit private to it. A lot of it's all bespoke so I can't
show you too much but when you upload the contract now we have this human
in the loop thing that we built. So you can be pulling out the licensing
approvals we show you where there is a verification system where I can
update it.

Cole Davis: I can then push this back into the customer system of record
which rights management of Conga, Oracle, Salesforce, it doesn't really
matter to us. We still take that mantra of we're switchboard for data like
we're just ver so that is another version of verified data. It's not
cryptographically verified. it is legally verified, but that human in the
loop mechanism is important anyway. if you're going to be issuing what we
call contract credentials, you need to make sure that the extracts are
right if you're doing it automated. and if you want to rebuild a chain of
title, which you can rebuild a chain of title directly from the contracts,
that can be done, too. Ideally, we'll do that with some of these early
early customers we're working with. A couple of them are some of the bigger
music companies.

Cole Davis: so yeah, it's really exciting. There's a lot going on. the
identity stuff is my favorite. it's in the background now and we will
certainly do amazing stuff with it. But as anyone knows, as a startup, you
have to make money and you got to pivot around to find what works. And so
we found something that works and eventually I think the industry will
catch up to what we're doing and why it's important because there's a ton
of fraud in the music industry. let's see where' I go. The music industry
is full of fraud. You have people now AI has supercharged that because you
can clone songs, you can do whatever you want with AI and you can make fake
accounts and no one knows what's real anymore.

Cole Davis: And I'm almost a little bit over it, frustrated with the
industry because I've been one of the only people yelling this for six
years, and no one seemed to listen. And now they're paying the price. they
don't know who has the right to do what's real. So this is the solution.
This is how you do it. I have, advocated. I've been like this evangelical
voice, who knows about the music industry. It's a very insular paranoid,
frustrating industry. It's not a great industry to be in if you're trying
to launch a startup. I'd like to now say it's where startups go to die. we
can do this with any type of contract in any industry and we are and will
be moving into other industries quickly. I'm glad that it did get adopted
on the legal tech side because there's a lot of excitement there.

Cole Davis: I'm going to keep pushing the identity things, but I can't
force people to adopt it, which is too bad. But, it is exciting. And some
people within the industry, I will say the head of technology at Universal
Music Group, he knew Manu from way back in the day. And he is the only
person, this is back in 2020 2022, when I started showing this stuff, he
was like, " my god, you're using W3C DSDs and VCs." And I was like, "Yeah."
And nobody knew what I was talking about, but he did. And so there are
these little islands in the music industry that know what's going on. It's
just they're hard to find. And then it's hard to push a giant bureaucratic
organization forward with technology. so that's what we do. we found a way
to make money and make things work. I want to pull the identity stuff in
more.

Cole Davis: As you all know it can be frustrating trying to push people to
adopt technology they don't fully understand. so with that we'll stop. Yeah.

Will Abramson: Great. Thanks so much,…

Will Abramson: It's very interesting to hear the challenges from the
trenches as it were. questions. Yeah, Manu.

Manu Sporny: Yeah, I mean this is all amazing stuff. Cole, I think so so
highly of the stuff that you're doing in the music industry and I'm again
very thrilled to see the traction that you've got on the contract stuff.
there was so much that you were showing through your demo I've seen the
demo a couple of times every time you go through the demo's that's awesome
that's even more awesome dive deep like that whole contract ingestion thing…
00:35:00

Manu Sporny: where you turn a contract into a verifiable credential that is
such a powerful thing like you are literally taking legal text and…

Cole Davis: Yeah. Yeah.

Manu Sporny: turning it into machine verifiable data and you did it in the
blink of an eye and…

Cole Davis: Yeah. Yeah.

Manu Sporny: if you don't know what's happening behind the scenes it's like
yeah whatever like …

Cole Davis: I know.

Manu Sporny: but I think that's amazing like that that is something that is
as useful in tons of different industries getting their completely
unstructured data into something structured that you can…

Cole Davis: Yeah. s***.

Manu Sporny: then operate over I think is huge plus one for your journey
right we've found the same kind of thing. nobody cares about DIDs and…

Cole Davis: Yep.

Manu Sporny: VCs and identity and all that kind of stuff. The stuff they
care about is the financial impact of the bad choices they've made around
how to collect data and move it through their systems, And so, I think we
found that it's just like how do you cut down on fraud? how do you make
these systems more resilient to AI fakes and all that kind of stuff. How do
you make sure that the human beings are respected and rewarded to drive
fundamentally the behavior you want to see? music industry doesn't exist
without musicians.

Cole Davis: Yeah. Heat.

Manu Sporny: how you need to figure out a way to, fairly compensate
everyone, in that stream. So, huge mad props to everything that you've been
able to accomplish. the product looks awesome. The whole contract
extracting thing is phenomenal. and that's great because your customers are
telling you where to go. That's great. that you've built on a strong base,
And I would expect that, some of the other people in the industry that
you're in haven't done that. They don't know about the proper way to
structure this stuff and all the nuances that you've had to, learn about
throughout the years. So, I wanted to Sorry, all I'm just gushing. the
thing I wanted to focus on is the whole contractual exchange using AI to
extract values from the contract and then pre-filling VCs.

Manu Sporny: I feel like that's a pattern that could help everyone in the
various market verticals that they're in. Could you speak more to that? do
you feel like that is going to be a core part of the way your product and…
other products are going to have to operate? I guess.

Manu Sporny:

Cole Davis: Yeah, I think I mean you obviously know and…

Cole Davis: picked up on it and we've talked about this before I personally
think this is the most important thing in the world, if you want to reduce
transaction costs and open up financial accounting services to people who
can't otherwise afford it, we need to be doing this. So that any identity
can verify Any identity, you can build receipt systems in the form of
contracts so I just personally think this is one of the most important
things in the whole world for commerce is enabling verifiable commerce and
blending the world of identity and law. I no longer see the world the way I
used to. I can't unsee it.

Cole Davis: so yes, I think being able to go what we call kind of
informally a contract credential, I think it's one of the most important
things in the world because as you go throughout your life day and you show
these credentials I can drive. Why do you live at your house? Because I
have a, deed of trust. can you prove that? let me go get the paper copy.
And why can you enter your building at work? It's because your employer has
a contract with a landlord that authorizes wow, that would be kind of cool
if we could turn that lease into a credential that can be showed to the
smart lock. you start to see this pattern everywhere where going through
life is a mix of showing credentials that are either issued to you by a
government by we'll call it constitutions or basically human rights law
treaties or contracts. And so I'm going after contracts.

Cole Davis: I think every contract in the world should be turned into this.
And so, yeah, I'm obviously very very passionate about this. yes, it can
get political, too, as far as maybe some people don't want that. Some
people don't want people to be able to prove they have authority, but to
me, it's important for a free society and for commerce to thrive that you
have this in place. so yeah, I mean what's amazing is I designed this
system back in 2020 2021 and I didn't know if it would work because I can
read code but what's so insane is they're like I could build little proofs
of concept. vibe code. I use a mix of Cursor Gemini and Claude and I can
vibe code versions to test my ideas and they work. It's like my god this is
insane.
00:40:00

Cole Davis: so yeah, I guess that's a long answer of I think this is one of
the most important things in the world. I used to be really involved in the
blockchain and the crypto world. I'm a lawyer now again because this stuff
costs a lot of money to build and venture capitalists didn't understand it
and no one would fund it and I was just like, "All right, I'll fund it
myself." So, yeah, it's been kind of an insane year. I've been working a
lot as both a lawyer and a founder and I represent some companies that are
very well known, very big in the crypto space because I know crypto. I
lived in that for three four years full-time so I can speak that language
and I see what everyone's doing with real world asset tokenization. I'm
just like I can't say it because they're clients but I'm like that's not
the right way to do this. there's better ways to do this.

Cole Davis: So, it's almost like VHS Betamax, I don't really want the
improper format to win and this is just Cole personally speaking, not Cole
as a lawyer at a law firm or Cole even as Switch Cords CEO. But yeah, I do
think that this is important to get right because if not then other ways
will be done and I just don't think it's as good long term because this is
totally privacy preserving if you did did carry or did anything that can be
purely to-peer you don't have to even have any of this on a blockchain I
just saw a comment pop up about Utah that's my goal here and obviously
there's people going to be say what if you're helping a violate sanctions
because

Cole Davis: you hire someone in a sanctured country to do your website.
maybe I don't know but I think that's healthy to be able to let people all
around the world do commercial activity with each other because to me
that's how you kind of bring about peace. money drives that stuff. So you
don't want to bomb the country that's sending you a ton of money…

Cole Davis: because you're doing a lot of business with them. So yeah,
sorry it gets a little phil philosophical but that's kind of driven this
over. Yeah, I've been doing this since 2016 in one form or another. my
entire life savings and career are tied up in this idea. So, I've thought
about it quite a bit.

Will Abramson: Great. Thanks,…

Will Abramson: I see Harrison on the queue.

Harrison Tang: First of all, thanks for sharing your entrepreneur stories
and journey. this reminds me a lot of my journey and thanks for sharing all
the stories. I wish the best of luck.

Harrison Tang: Yeah,…

Cole Davis: I think it's less.

Harrison Tang: just want to clarify why does your customers care about
structure outputs from legal contracts? Is it to build some kind of
predictive models around some kind of revenue or risk mitigation is for
modeling purposes or for something else? Just want to

Cole Davis:

Cole Davis: It's actually less for modeling. I mean we've shown people I've
built custom interfaces in Air Table just to show people like hey the
insights you can generate from this are pretty amazing and they're like my
god you're right. So I don't know maybe I think differently because I did
study again I went on this crazy research journey that I self-funded and so
I spent two years studying data science and machine learning. So that's how
I think most of them just want it to be able to populate their rights
management system that then helps them they get an inbound license request
from a movie studio that says hey we want to license that song Cole wrote
into this film they need to then check okay is who owns the song do we have
the right to license it into that media in that territory for that term so
there's all these conditions

Cole Davis: to how you monetize intellectual property like a copyright. I
mean, it's the same thing with monetizing physical assets like a house.
It's just a house is a lot easier to think about. copyright's tricky
because you can infinitely divide the rights under copyright. and so, to
grant that license, the record company or music publisher needs to quickly
be able to look at their rights management database or rights management
system and know yes, I can grant that license or let me check real quick.
So, if all your stuff is in paperbased contracts, you got to go check them
and it's a huge pain. No one has time. Everyone's always understaffed and
overworked and you can lose licensing deals.
00:45:00

Cole Davis: license deals can move quickly and the film studio may or
definitely a television production company will say I need to know in the
next five hours or 12 hours because this thing's going to air in a week and
we have to send it to the distributor and so if they send the film or the
TV show out to be distributed without the rights cleared boom now you got
potential copyright infringement when it gets played in public so a lot of
times it's just they need to know in order to monetize their stuff But you
landed on it. It's like why don't you So switch core was event originally
built to be a sync licensing marketplace. This was way back seven eight
years ago. Sync licensing is licensing into music and sorry into film and
TV and audio visual works.

Cole Davis: and the music industry because copyright ownership is so broken
and so messy and the databases are a bit of a disaster. it's really hard to
know who owns what. And so almost all the other major revenue streams in
the music industry are in some sense regulated by the government because
there's a lot of antitrust issues because these are in order to effectively
license songs to every bar in the country, you have to do that with that
one entity now has a illegal copyright pool and can extort the market,
which has happened before. So, those entities are regulated by the
Department of Justice. there's getting into some theory, but it's important
to understand how people think in the music industry. And so, this one
entity grants all these different licenses. that entity keeps a database of
who owns That is controlled by that entity, not the publishers and the
record labels.

Cole Davis: And that's how we got into this mess is everyone has outsourced
the data to other people and it breaks the workflows. And so that was the
goal was like why don't we build a virtualized nondatabase of ownership
where theoretically every did that represents the composition. You DID
documents to find the controllers. You could extract the credentials to
then show how to contact them. And you could build a dynamic licensing
marketplace where you just send a request to the DID and it forwards it
along to whoever it needs to. And I used to talk about the music industry
and nobody knows what I'm talking about. So we just gave up. We're like,
"All right, this is not going to work." So we pivoted from a marketplace to
what I showed you, which was "All right, sending data from songwriters to
music publishers."

Cole Davis: that's a long long answer to your question of what are people
doing with the data just like the basics when they could be doing really
amazing stuff. And so one of the reasons why we had to structure the data
the licensing marketplace was to enable AI to look for trends so that you
could have price discovery in very illquid markets like sync licensing.
there's also I did a lot of research on machine learning on distributed
data sets because I want everyone to control their data. I don't want
switchboard to be a central source of failure in case we didn't survive. So
the whole system's actually set up to be fully decentralized. It's just we
don't have the resources to do it. that's an insane amount of work and
effort.

Cole Davis: But if every did has what used to be called identity hubs
everything can be held client side like the writer and the artist can
control all of their data. They can have all their contractual
relationships modeled. they can take their stuff and leave one publisher
and go to another publisher and just plug in, and it's crazy because I know
I'm just doing a lot of talking, but I think it's really interesting stuff.
And I'm sure this is in lots of other industries, but that big there's
three or four in the US. There's companies that license music to all the
bars, restaurants, TV shows that are regulated by the Department of
Justice. They all compete with each other. They don't really want to lose
their writers to each other. They want to keep them.

Cole Davis: And so they make it hard for the writer to take the data to the
new organization. So it's completely insane. And I do think some people in
the music industry see what we built and it is a threat. it's the realities
of politics in the music industry. what we build solves problems, but it
also creates problems for certain gatekeepers and intermediaries Cole,
that's what we do, so It's really hard to get a product like that off the
ground that does hurt certain intermediaries historical revenue streams.
00:50:00

Will Abramson: I actually had a question around this translating from a
contract to a machine readable credential.

Will Abramson: How does that work? obviously for specific types of
credentials of contracts do you have to define custom credential schema
specific to that contract that says right this kind of thing.

Cole Davis: Yeah. Yeah.

Cole Davis: That's why we stayed super simple and we just have a songwriter
credential. it's the same schema them like you would to be fully
interoperable like you would need to have contract credential schema you'd
have to have and…

Will Abramson: Right. Right.

Cole Davis: there are people that were working on that there's a group out
of the UK that's been working on that for contract schema there's pockets
of people doing this but yeah it would be helpful that the tricky thing is
every contract is different obviously you could certainly do it for let's
say I know in Texas all apartment leases follow this certain form that's
been approved by a trade organization and the government like that's super
easy that cool automate that schema I know trade doc this is happening in
global trade trade documents so a bill of lighting is a contract these are
all in trade trade finance those are all

Cole Davis: pretty standardized. So, those are great and there's people
doing that. I know Transmute was working on that. There's a handful that
were really going hard on that, which is super cool to see. but yeah,…

Will Abramson: Cool. Yeah,…

Cole Davis: so It's tricky do you wait around for the standards process to
play out or do you just plow forward? And we're just going to plow forward,
see what happens. Yeah, I think AI is what's going to push a lot of this,…

Will Abramson: I guess this contract world the legal word is squishy but
maybe the AI agents can help translate into sort of a more standard form u
credential

Cole Davis: which is great. I'm so happy that it came up because it enabled
a lot of stuff we wanted to do without us having to train our own models
because, the LMS are so good at this. And so I'm part of this legal vibe
coding group on LinkedIn…

Will Abramson: Mhm.

Cole Davis: where it's just insane what's happening now that techsavvy
lawyers have figured out wait a second I don't have to pay 100,000 for
Harvey like I can build that and so you got people basically taking
screenshots of these really expensive legal tech tools and just v coding
their own. I do the same thing as a lawyer I now vive code all my own tools
for my day-to-day activities and it's really incredible. So, I think AI is
going to force people. You have all these people building these products
that then don't interoperate. and that'll be interesting to see what
happens when you've got people at all these enterprises vibe coding their
own tools that are not complying with, their enterprise requirements.

Cole Davis: I think it may drive standardization, which hopefully will
trickle down to the legal industry and maybe would someday result in
defined contract schema for contract A versus contract B. I'm not really
sure. it would be a good thing for, a group of us to talk about sometime.

Will Abramson: Harrison and…

Will Abramson: then Demetri, we've got seven minutes left.

Harrison Tang: Yeah. …

Harrison Tang: I'm just curious, do you think the AILM can actually for
lack better term make decisions based on the data available like structured
data or…

Harrison Tang: even just reading the documents? Yeah. Yeah,…

Cole Davis: As far as agentic commerce would go or…

Cole Davis: just about what's in a contract?

Harrison Tang: because earlier you mentioned a lot of times the lawyers
just look at the rights, And then look at basic stuff and say, "Hey, should
I sign this or not?" Do you think the Agentic AI can do those things? Yeah.

Cole Davis: Yep. a lot of lawyers don't want to hear this but I have
accepted that AI is better than me at most things in my day-to-day now and
it's weird to say that I still am smarter than the AI as a lawyer but it
can keep things more things in mind than I can and so I've accepted that
and I

Cole Davis: view it as a partner and we work together on everything is it
going to be making so we get into the world and I'm glad that I've seen
this start to come up but I feel like the law of agency this sub part of
law is going to become really important now because historically it's like
did the limited partner have the right to act on behalf of the general
partner it's like these corporate things about did so and so have authority
to engage in that transaction I think obviously most of you know this but
agentic commerce is that it's like did the agent have the authority to act
on behalf of this participant in both sides of transaction. so yes I do
think that agents will be acting on behalf of people but I think there's
going to be a lot of lawsuits over did they exceed their authority.
00:55:00

Cole Davis: A great way to prove that authority would be a credential that
shows that a contract credential is like this agent is acting in this
capacity on behalf of this person and this person has capacity on behalf of
this enterprise it's like that delegated hierarchical thing that I think we
need to think about I don't know that we are…

Cole Davis: but I think it's really important

Will Abramson: Thanks.

Will Abramson: Dimmitri

Dmitri Zagidulin: Yeah, my question is there anything either
specificationwise or…

Dmitri Zagidulin: like working library or open source software wise that
you wish existed in the SQL system that would make your life easier?

Cole Davis: That's a really good question.

Cole Davis: Yeah, I'd have to get back to you, Demetri. I mean, that's a
conversation for at IIW.

Dmitri Zagidulin:

Dmitri Zagidulin: No worries. Yeah, there you

Cole Davis: I think yeah there's a ton we do everything kind of we use the
DDS spec the VC spec we write everything ourselves and Jonathan Rayback is
an adviser he helps us quite a bit like Jonathan helped us implement the
did web s spec just to show that off for our forensic life so yeah there's
a lot I think legal is this massive industry a massive need that has been
kind

Cole Davis: ignored by the identity space and I do think there could be
some open source tools that would help everyone progress faster.

Cole Davis: So yeah, that's an IW chat over some beers.

Dmitri Zagidulin: Sounds

Will Abramson: Great. …

Will Abramson: any final thoughts, Skull, before we close

Cole Davis: No. I would say I appreciate this community. I'm sort of the
random lawyer that started showing up to IW and getting involved and people
like Manu kind of adopted me and were like, "Yeah, that. We need your
thinking." And so, yeah, I'm in a bunch of different industry trade groups
throughout the music and legal and the identity one is still my favorite.
it's the closest. It's the most collaborative. so yeah, I as frustrated as
I can get sometimes with trying to evangelize this tech to something like
the music industry, I know that this is I know that this group I know that
everyone in this area is right. I know it and at this point I've not seen
anything that could convince me otherwise.

Cole Davis: So yeah, I guess that's a good way to close and say, we'll get
there. we'll try and horse this stuff in one way or another. Yeah.

Will Abramson: Thanks, Cole.

Will Abramson: I think I speak for everyone here. We definitely appreciate
your involvement, too. And thanks so much for today's call. It's been a
wide ranging discussion. A lot to think about. thanks everybody.

Cole Davis: Cool. thanks for having me on and…

Will Abramson: Have a Yeah,…

Cole Davis: hope to see some of you at IW. We chat more.

Will Abramson: And just to flag, next week we do have a talk on AI agent
identity stuff,…

Will Abramson: project NANDA. So if you're around, do join us next week.
Thanks so much. See you.

Cole Davis: Very cool.
Meeting ended after 00:59:03 👋

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