How hard is it to protect intellectual property on the web today? To understand, put yourself in the shoes of someone who owns and manages a blog. That person likely creates original digital content and also republishes content created by others. Preventing misuse of the blog owner’s original articles is very challenging because there is little to stop someone from copying and pasting them to another site without permission.

At the same time, ensuring that the content that the blog republishes conforms with other people’s intellectual property rights is tough because it may be hard to determine what those rights are. An original content owner might, for example, allow his or her intellectual property to be freely reused provided that the original author receives credit. Or the owner might require payment, or impose other terms. But in the absence of a reliable, standardized, fair way to share and enforce the licensing terms that govern their content, ensuring that others respect the original owner’s intellectual property rights is very challenging.

This is the challenge that intellectual property creators and owners face constantly on the web today. The advent of the internet has created fundamental new challenges for securing intellectual property rights. Yet the systems that we still rely upon for enforcing those rights — which is based on the work of lawyers and legal frameworks — was born in the pre-digital age and is no longer sufficient for addressing today’s intellectual property challenges.

To achieve true intellectual property security in the digital age, we need a solution like the decentralized Po.et network.

Securing Intellectual Property

Protecting your intellectual property from being stolen or misused, either willfully or accidentally, is tough for several reasons.

The most obvious one is that it has become so trivially easy to copy data in the digital age. Most digital assets have no built-in mechanism for preventing someone from copying or redistributing them without permission. Even when digital protections do exist, such as in the case of DRM-protected content, clever attackers can often find ways to defeat the systems that are supposed to keep intellectual property secure.

Intellectual property security is also difficult because it can be hard to determine who owns what and which licensing requirements govern how a given intellectual property asset can be reused. Licensing information is not always included with digital content, and if it is, there is no guarantee that it is accurate and up-to-date.

The Limits of Traditional Intellectual Property Protections

Content owners can and should use the legal tools at their disposal to help protect their intellectual property. However, these solutions on their own are often insufficient for defending property rights. The main reason is that enforcing rights via legal avenues can be time-consuming and costly. This is especially true in the digital age, when online assets can be copied so quickly.

Meanwhile, simply, tracking down someone who violates your intellectual property on the wilds of the internet by misusing content can prove impossible. Even if you can find property rights violators, proving in a courtroom that they have misused content is often problematic because of a lack of consistent standards for registering and enforcing intellectual property rights.

As a recent example of where confusion about usage rights have appeared, the District Court of Virginia ruled in favor of Violent Hues Productions in a case where it was accused of unlawfully using a photograph taken by the plaintiff, Russell Brammer. The court looked at the purpose and character of use, the contents of the photograph, how much of the work was copied and prior publications of the work to decide that there was no violation of copyright laws and that its usage of the photograph was fair use.

Additionally, because it is often not worth the time and money for intellectual property holders to pursue lawsuits for small-scale infringements, legal protections typically work well only in cases of major intellectual property theft. Even the registration of content with the U.S. Copyright Office, to ensure that you can receive the proper awards for damages, can cost anywhere from $35 to $85.

Most importantly, there is no ubiquitous repository of information for content on the internet, nor are there universal standards for content registration and distribution. There’s no such thing as “international copyright,” only the Berne Convention, administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization.

To do better than the current status quo, we’re going to have to start working together to build technology that helps us self-regulate.

How Blockchain Technology Enables a Better Approach

Until recently, relying on lawyers and courts (as well as, in some cases, imperfect technological solutions such as DRM) was the only way to attempt to enforce intellectual property rights. Fortunately, a better solution is now available. The emergence of blockchain technology has made it possible to build a decentralized network for registering and enforcing intellectual property rights.

This, of course, is precisely what Po.et does. By allowing digital content creators and owners to register their assets on a blockchain, Po.et can help enable protection of intellectual property at all stages of the pipeline — from the time that an asset is first created and its attribution is established, through to distribution and redistribution of the content. As of now, there isn’t any specific legal standard set where a blockchain can be used to settle legal disputes, but we’re starting to see governments, like China, open up to the possibilities that blockchain technology can afford.

Because the Po.et network is decentralized and registers its data to a public blockchain, no one can modify the attribution and intellectual property claims that are registered on it. And because the network can be accessed by anyone, finding the intellectual property claims associated with a given piece of content is simple once it is registered by Po.et.

Building the “Good Web”

Is it possible to create a “good web”? This is the question that motivates me every morning to work on Po.et.

On the good web, intellectual property rights for digital content would be routinely recorded and enforced in a universal way. This would mean not only that legitimate content creators and owners would always have a record and audit log to back up their intellectual property rights, but also that anyone who wishes to challenge those rights in order to misuse content would have to prove that he or she followed the same common standards to register his or her intellectual property.

Because everything must be recorded on-chain, people who are up to no good would be much easier to spot. Anyone who repeatedly claims to own intellectual property but cannot support his or her claims through the universal audit logs that everyone uses to record property rights would have a difficult time pursuing fraudulent claims.

The core Po.et team can’t go at this alone. Applications and third parties will have to do their part to plug into the ecosystem for all of this to work. In that spirit, we’ve started Po.et Development Labs to help bring together different companies and contributors to build on top of Po.et’s open protocols.

There’s a very long road ahead to ensure that the good web becomes the new standard, but this is the future of the internet and Po.et hopes to contribute at least some portion of the technical and cultural infrastructure to make it possible.