Intellectual Property and the Blockchain

Just another category of assets…

One particularly interesting application of Blockchain technology in context to rLoops work is the management of legal rights related to intellectual property such as copyrights, patents, and trademarks. It’s easy to see some of the immediate and obvious benefits of applying distributed ledger technology here: reduced overhead, reduced transaction costs, reduced friction, and increased transparency, to name a few.

As we move from an Internet of Information to an Internet of Value, the ability to efficiently and effectively manage (and even program) assets on the blockchain becomes accessible to a new wave of entrepreneurs and communities. Any asset in the world can be tokenized and managed on a blockchain, and Intellectual Property is just another category of assets.

It seems presently that there are two paths which we may travel down — the first leads to traditional intellectual property protection/management but leveraging blockchain technology for an always-on database which is free from manipulation. This path is relatively well defined and simple to follow — it marries an existing framework to new innovations.

The second path, with many forks itself, leads to a completely foreign framework, re-imagining the very concept of intellectual property protection. What happens when all work is immutably and auditably recorded on permissionless blockchains? What happens when all contributions along the creation chain can be measured against their economic outputs? What happens in the instance of a mesh of agents operating autonomously but in concert with each other to produce complex and interdependent outputs? This path challenges existing legal and technical norms, and yet is a more attractive path in its own way.

For the time being, the existing state of intellectual property protection — with all of its faults and shortcomings — must be embraced though it can (and should) be enhanced with new technologies such as the blockchain. But the capabilities and opportunities that emerging blockchain technology presents does warrant a re-examination of long-accepted norms — and intellectual property is no exception.

Certainly this is an inceptive capability for blockchain technology, but one that we are excited to be a part of!