A static record can support governance, but it cannot replace it. When a dynamic economy is ruled by a frozen ledger, injustice is structural rather than accidental. The lesson of Domesday is not to abandon centralized records, but to build institutions that acknowledge change, dispute, and time.
Introduction: The Problem of the Frozen Record
The Domesday Book was not wrong so much as frozen. It rendered a living, changing system of land tenure into a static ledger that became authoritative precisely because it could not keep up with reality. The Mechanical Licensing Collective (“MLC”) repeats this error in digital form. Musical works ownership is dynamic, relational, and contested, yet royalties flow based on a fixed snapshot that is at least potentially outdated the moment it is operationalized. In both systems, the problem is not bad data but the pretense that a static record can govern a dynamic economy without producing systemic error.[1] That’s why I always recommend Weapons of Math Destruction by Kathy O’Neil to MLC executives, which they promptly ignore.
I argue that the failure mode is mostly structural, not technical. The technical part is relatively trivial, compared to say AI training or protein folds. I think it could be built far quicker, far cheaper, and far more accurately than the MLC which has blown a unique opportunity to start with a blank sheet of paper and instead perpetuated the Harry Fox Agency which was founded well before FoxPro. The lesson of Domesday is not that better enumeration solves governance problems, but that static records require institutional counterweights to prevent injustice, capture, and permanent misallocation. That is, to prevent the MLC to be like the MLC.
Background: Two Authoritative Ledgers
A. The Domesday Book
Commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1085–1086, the Domesday Book was a comprehensive survey of landholding and economic resources in post‑Conquest England.[2] Its purpose was fiscal and administrative: to identify who held land, what that land was worth, and what obligations were owed to the Crown.[3] Domesday recorded information through sworn local inquests and was intended to be definitive.
Crucially, Domesday was never designed to be updated, at least not in real time. It froze a moment in time and became authoritative precisely because it was fixed. Almost immediately, it diverged from reality as land changed hands through death, forfeiture, re‑grant, and political favor.[4] Rather than revise Domesday, medieval England developed supplementary institutions—annual fiscal records, local courts, and royal adjudication—to manage change and dispute.[5]
B. The Mechanical Licensing Collective
The Mechanical Licensing Collective was created by Congress in the Music Modernization Act of 2018 to administer the blanket mechanical license for digital music services in the United States.[6] The MLC maintains a centralized database of musical works ownership, collects mechanical royalties from digital service providers, and distributes those royalties to songwriters and publishers.[7]
Musical ownership, however, is inherently dynamic. Writers change publishers, estates open and close, ownership splits are disputed, and metadata is frequently incomplete or corrected only after use aka “Copyright Control.”[8] As a result, the MLC’s database—however well‑intentioned—is outdated almost as soon as it is operationalized.
Domesday as a Governance Tool, Not a Truth Machine
Domesday succeeded at centralizing authority, not at preserving truth over time. Land tenure in eleventh‑century England was dynamic, relational, and politically contingent. Domesday froze these relationships into an official record that quickly diverged from lived reality, yet retained legal force because it was authoritative rather than accurate.[9]. Nothing that a Norman knight with broadsword and mace couldn’t fix.
Importantly, medieval England did not rely on Domesday alone. The development of Pipe Rolls, hundred and shire courts, and royal justice provided mechanisms to contextualize, correct, and supersede the frozen record.[10]
The MLC as Digital Domesday
The MLC performs a structurally similar function today. It fixes ownership claims, establishes a canonical record, and allocates ongoing revenue streams while disputes remain unresolved. Royalties flow based on the database snapshot in effect at the time of use, even when that snapshot is known to be incomplete or incorrect.[11]
As with Domesday, authority substitutes for adaptability. The database becomes dispositive not because it reflects reality, but because it governs the flow of money.
Three Solutions Grounded in Domesday’s Afterlife
1. Authoritative Record Plus Living Supplement (The Pipe Roll Model)
Domesday was supplemented by the Pipe Rolls—annual fiscal records that reflected changes in obligations over time.[12] Applied to the MLC, this suggests separating baseline records from continuous reconciliation layers and treating unmatched royalties as unreconciled obligations of the MLC rather than abandoned property of the songwriter.
2. Jurisdictional Pluralism (The Hundred and Shire Court Model)
Domesday did not eliminate local adjudication. Disputes were resolved in courts that contextualized Domesday entries rather than deferring blindly to them.[13] Similarly, ownership and split disputes should be resolved in external and independent fora, with the MLC conforming its records and payouts to those determinations.
3. No Profit from Unresolved Ownership (The No Escheat Without Judgment Model)
In medieval England, the Crown could claim land only through recognized legal mechanisms such as forfeiture or escheat.[14] Uncertainty alone did not justify enrichment. A Domesday‑informed reform would prohibit institutional profit from unresolved ownership and require segregation of disputed funds.
By contrast, the MLC “black box” is not escheatment at all—yet it functionally resembles one-sided escheatment without due process. Under traditional escheat or unclaimed-property regimes, the state’s claim arises only after defined predicates: notice, diligence, and a lawful adjudication or administrative determination of abandonment, coupled with a public fiduciary obligation to locate the owner. The black box instead permits private retention and deployment of other people’s money based solely on unresolved ownership, without a judgment of abandonment, without a comparable duty to search, and with the economic upside of delay accruing to the intermediary rather than the missing payee.
For example, California requires some effort:
California law requires all holders (corporations, businesses, associations, financial institutions, and insurance companies) of unclaimed property to attempt to contact owners before reporting their property to the State Controller’s Office.
Holders are required to send a notice to the owner’s last known address informing them that the property will be transferred to the State Controller’s Office for safekeeping if the owner does not contact them to retrieve it.
The State Controller’s Office sends notices to all owners of property that will be transferred to the state. These notices are sent out before the property is to be transferred, giving owners an opportunity to retrieve property directly from the holder.
The constitutional problem is sharpened by Title I of the MMA, which expressly preempts state escheatment and unclaimed-property laws—but does not replace them with functionally equivalent federal protections. States are forbidden to take custody of abandoned property without notice, diligence, and due process; yet the MMA authorizes a private entity to hold, invest (or so MLC argues), and ultimately distribute unmatched royalties on a market share basis (including to companies represented on MLC’s board of directors) without any finding of abandonment, without judicial process, and without a neutral public custodian. This asymmetry raises serious Due Process and Equal Protection concerns (not to mention conflicts of interest), and potentially a Takings Clause problem: Congress may not displace state escheat safeguards and simultaneously permit private enrichment from unresolved ownership where states themselves would be constitutionally barred from proceeding without judgment and owner-protective procedures. It also raises a classic unconstitutional state preemption without federal statute problem.[15]
Three Contemporary Reforms the MLC Could Adopt
1. Authoritative Record + Living Reconciliation Layer (The Pipe Roll Model)
Adopt a structural separation between the MLC’s baseline ownership database and a continuous reconciliation system that tracks changes, corrections, disputes, and late‑arriving claims on a monthly basis.
In practice, unmatched royalties would be treated as unreconciled obligations rather than quasi‑abandoned funds. The MLC would maintain a rolling, auditable ledger capable of updating distributions when ownership data changes, including retroactive true‑ups once claims are resolved, instead of locking outcomes to a stale snapshot.
This reform acknowledges that ownership is dynamic and prevents early database errors from permanently reallocating value.
2. Independent Adjudication with Mandatory Conformance (The Hundred and Shire Court Model)
Formally decouple ownership and split dispute resolution from the MLC’s internal processes and require the MLC to conform its records and payouts to determinations made by independent fora.
In practice, disputes would be resolved in courts, arbitrations, or designated independent neutral bodies, and the MLC would treat those determinations as binding inputs rather than discretionary metadata updates. The database would no longer enjoy a presumption of correctness when ownership is contested and disputes would not be resolved by conflicted statutory committees.
This prevents the MLC from acting as judge, jury, and paymaster and restores legitimacy to ownership determinations.
3. Mandatory Segregation and No Profit from Unresolved Ownership (The No Escheat Without Judgment Model)
Prohibit the MLC from retaining, investing, or reallocating royalties tied to unresolved ownership and incentives them to find the correct owners.
In practice, all black‑box royalties would be held in segregated custodial accounts or at least ledgers. Market‑share distributions would be barred unless and until lawful abandonment is established, and the MLC would carry an affirmative duty to search for and notify potential claimants, analogous to the duties of traditional unclaimed‑property regimes.
This removes perverse incentives to delay resolution and aligns the MLC with basic due‑process and fiduciary norms, especially critical given the MMA’s preemption of state escheat laws (which itself may be unconstitutional).
Taken together, these reforms shift the MLC away from treating a frozen ledger as dispositive authority and toward an institutional design that acknowledges change, dispute, and time—without sacrificing administrative efficiency. At $40 million a year, they should be able to pull this off or at least start slouching toward Bethlehem.
[1] S.F.C. Milsom, Historical Foundations of the Common Law (2d ed. 1981).
[2] Domesday Book (1086).
[3] R. Allen Brown, The Normans and the Norman Conquest (2d ed. 1985).
[4] J.C. Holt, Domesday Studies (1987).
[5] Mark Hagger, William: King and Conqueror (2012).
[6] Music Modernization Act, Pub. L. No. 115‑264, 132 Stat. 3676 (2018).
[7] 17 U.S.C. § 115(d).
[8] U.S. Copyright Office, Music Modernization Act Implementation Report (2019).
[9] F.W. Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond (1897).
[10] Richard FitzNigel, Dialogus de Scaccario (Dialogue concerning the Exchequer) (c. 1179).
[11] Copyright Royalty Judges, Phonorecords III & IV.
[12] Pipe Roll Society, The Pipe Roll of Henry I.
[13] Paul Brand, The Origins of the English Legal Profession (1992).
[14] Escheat is a common-law legal mechanism by which real property reverted to the Crown when a tenant died intestate and without lawful heirs. At common law, escheat required the extinction of the tenant’s line of inheritance; mere uncertainty of title or ownership was insufficient. In modern U.S. law, escheat has been adapted to intangible and unclaimed property, but it retains the same core features: notice, diligence, and a lawful determination of abandonment or lack of heirs before the sovereign (in our case a State) may take custody.
[15] See Connecticut Mutual Life Ins. Co. v. Moore, 333 U.S. 541 (1948); Texas v. New Jersey, 379 U.S. 674 (1965) (states may take custody of abandoned property only subject to procedural protections and priority rules); Cf. Webb’s Fabulous Pharmacies, Inc. v. Beckwith, 449 U.S. 155 (1980) (interest on private funds held by a custodian remains private property; government may not appropriate economic benefits without just compensation).
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