Soundmark School · Est. 2026
Soundmark School is the legal & legislative arm of the Academy. We teach the New Orleans vanguard to fortify acoustic empires under U.S. trademark and copyright law — and we draft the bill that finally modernizes the 1972 Sound Recording Amendment for the streaming, sampling, and machine-learning era.
You don’t just register a song. You fortify the entire acoustic identity — the tag, the timbre, the room signature, the chain. Four modules, every cohort.
Module 01
How to successfully register a non-traditional Soundmark with the USPTO — producer tags, intro drops, distinct percussive identifiers, and vocal signatures. Filing strategy, specimen capture, and acquired-distinctiveness proof.
Module 02
Log raw vocal stems, analog signal chains, and pre-mix provenance into the Sanctuary archive. An immutable ledger of authorship that survives the takedown era and forecloses unauthorized AI scraping.
Module 03
Direct participation in writing the open-source policy frameworks. Students leave with bill language, committee memoranda, and a working knowledge of how copyright statute is actually amended.
Module 04
How a bill becomes statute, how to read a committee markup, how to write testimony staff actually quote. Six-track civic literacy module — bridge between the studio floor and the Judiciary Committee.
Enter Creator Civics →Six planks. Drafted on the Chef Menteur floor, published open-source, built to amend 17 U.S.C. directly. This is what the 1972 statute should have looked like once recordings stopped being objects and started being signals.
§ 01
Close the remaining gaps left by the Music Modernization Act. Every recording — regardless of fixation date — clears under a single statutory royalty schedule, payable to the original artist or estate.
§ 02
A federal registry for producer tags, drops, ad-libs, and signature timbres — separate from the song copyright, separate from the master. First-to-file with a one-year cure window for legacy marks.
§ 03
Any model trained on commercial recordings must publish its training set and clear opt-out within ninety days. Statutory damages scale with catalog size. No more silent ingestion.
§ 04
Cryptographic provenance — stem hashes, session timestamps, room signatures — admissible as prima facie evidence of authorship in infringement and clearance disputes.
§ 05
Statutory minimum points for credited engineers and producers on master revenue, mirroring the AFM/SAG-AFTRA floor for performers. Non-waivable in work-for-hire.
§ 06
Federal landmark status for working studios of cultural significance, with property-tax abatement tied to continued operation, public access, and archival deposit.
Sound Recording Amendment
1972
Federal copyright finally extends to sound recordings — but only those fixed after February 15, 1972. Everything before is left to a patchwork of state law.
DMCA
1998
Notice-and-takedown becomes the industry's only enforcement reflex. Burden shifts to creators.
Music Modernization Act
2018
Pre-1972 recordings finally get federal protection — but producer tags, signature timbres, and training-data ingestion remain unaddressed.
Soundmark Draft I
2026
First open-source draft of the Modernization Act published from the Chef Menteur floor. Public comment opens immediately.
Floor Vote · Mandate
2029
Project 2029 sunsets with a bill on the floor. The Serenity Plan delivers both the curriculum and the legislation.
Closing Mandate
Soundmark School graduates engineers who file their own marks, producers who own their tags on paper, and policy fellows who can write a bill. The legislation lands on the floor when the second cohort graduates.
