Intellectual Property: Can blockchain help to protect it?
Renato Pires dos Santos
Founder & Lead Developer at academicum.ai | Building AI-Powered Tools to Enhance Academic Research and Learning
The widespread use of the Internet led to an increased speed of information flow that brought new ways of producing and sharing content.
The upside is that it facilitated and popularised the production and sharing, making about everyone a producer today, as the cliché goes. Contemporary art alone e.g. was recently described as “a multi-billion dollar unregulated market with unclear criteria just waiting to be harnessed”[1]. The downside is that everyone now feels allowed to grab content from the Internet and republish it (modified or not) as if it were their own, passing over the idea of having to comply with copyright laws. IP (Intellectual Property) rights are often violated as, e.g. short videos can be copied and transmitted via mobile devices easily[2]. This phenomenon was already thoroughly studied by Lawrence Lessig, who coined the term ‘remix culture’[3].
On the one hand, to account for the growing number of abuses, the structure of copyright law enforcement grew, as well as the number of middlepersons in the process of collecting royalty payments, with the resulting reduction of the amount received by the authors. The IP market is dominated by companies ultimately motivated by their own financial prosperity, rather than by the general social development. This phenomenon was also studied by Lawrence Lessig, who coined the term ‘permission culture’ in contrast with ‘free culture’[4], promoted by Lawrence Lessig and other copyright activists.
On the other hand, the growing number of authors makes it difficult for small producers to become visible and to compete in the market. Creators generally do not have expertise in sales and marketing to obtain a fair financial reward from its production nor in the law to protect its IP.
There is a wide range of objects that may be subject of IP subject deposit:
- works of science, literature and art;
- programs for electronic computers (computer programs);
- databases;
- artistic performances;
- phonograms;
- broadcast or cable broadcast of radio or television programs;
- inventions (drawings with description);
- industrial designs (drawings with description);
- selection achievements;
- topologies of integrated circuits;
- production secrets (know-how);
- company names;
- trademarks and service marks.
Nevertheless, intellectual creations with potential cultural values may not be easily traded and owned in the conventional sense and, consequently, be valued (or rather: valorised) appropriately. There is a lack of accessible opportunities for a fair public evaluation of the “cultural value” of the author’s productions. Copyright and other IP tools have been frequently employed to countervail this problem but with little success[5]. There is practically no legal framework that regulates and protects the Internet as an information and communication technology and primarily as a media for IP diffusion.
In practice, electronic documents IP rights are rarely protected or enforced as many cases have been considered as having not strong enough legal evidence, mainly under the argument that any electronic document can be modified easily. Thus, producers often choose to ignore violations due to the virtual impossibility of recovering eventual prosecution cost from litigation. Various authors argue that a possible solution for this issue is to make use of blockchain technology.
Nowadays, besides supporting cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology can also be used to record virtually everything that can be expressed in code: birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, deeds and titles of ownership, financial accounts, medical records, votes, the provenance of food, and so on[6]. In this context of artworks production, blockchain technology can likewise record full documentation of a digital artefact’s provenance, circulation, and ownership history[7].
Tying intellectual creations, or their digitalised versions, to the blockchain means to give them virtually unforgeable identities and to turn them into artificially unique, tradeable units potentially bearing commercial value, which can then be recorded, documented and monitored on a distributed, publicly accessible electronic, anonymous ledger, whose content is protected from tampering by a cryptographic system that is exceedingly difficult to break, hopefully helping to integrate those creations with existing art markets[8].
After such a shift, a set of traditional, powerful, central, human-contingent intermediaries, notoriously subject to corruption, would get replaced with a more diffuse network intermediary, in theory, controlled by no-one in particular, in which ‘trust’ is provided by the technology itself, as the integrity of the carrier system is not ideologically but cryptographically determined[9]. Besides, once registered on the blockchain, so-called "smart contracts"[10] running on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) are then set to enforce the distribution licenses attached to the artefacts quasi-autonomously[11].
Some authors argue that the hybridising of the blockchain and IP policy into a high-efficiency financial technology useful for regulating digital art markets will not help revolutionise the institutionalised art world to the benefit of digital artists but rather worrisomely accelerate and intensify long-standing efforts to fence in creative expression as private property[12]. This discussion, albeit relevant and exciting, greatly transcends the scope of this article.
Practical limitations on how much data can be sent in a transaction or stored in a contract[13] make it unfeasible to store on the blockchain the papers and their reviews texts, the manuscripts, data, reviews, and records of operation themselves. One possible solution is to host these files on a public, decentralised storage provided by an accounting protocol such as BitTorrent[14], Swarm[15], IPFS[16] and then place their immutable, permanently timestamped hash links into Ethereum public blockchain transactions.
Previous attempts of providing cryptographic blockchain hashes as a proof of the existence of intellectual creations, or of their digitalised versions, include OriginStamp[17], Storj[18], filecoin[19], MaidSAFE[20], ProofofExistence[21]. Later on, Monegraph[22], Ascribe[23], and COALA IP[24] were launched with the additional purpose of empowering creators who may so far not have been able to affirm fair recognition, valuation, and monetisation for their works[25]. Currently, there are various other companies offering different services to this sector[26], but one particular company caught our attention and we accepted to act as their advisor.
Brain Space[27] is being developed by Imperium Ltd and aims at being a blockchain-based ecosystem of related services, intended to solve different problems that affect not only IP protection but also talent promotion and further popularisation of cultural values authors in the modern market.
Brain Space aims at helping authors, even ‘home producers’ and garage bands, regardless of the quality of their work, the level of their skills, their geographical location, their attachment to religion, or their material welfare, to simplify and expand the possibilities of their IP registration, to enter the global market and get paid.
References
[1] https://theoriginalcopy.net/isca/
[2] https://doi.org/10.1109/SOSE.2017.35
[3] https://www.amazon.com.br/Remix-Making-Commerce-Thrive-Economy/dp/0143116134
[4] https://www.amazon.com/Free-Culture-Nature-Future-Creativity/dp/0143034650
[5] https://doi.org/10.1109/SOSE.2017.35
[6] https://doi.org/10.1111/meta.12266
[7] https://doi.org/10.1109/SOSE.2017.35
[8] https://doi.org/10.1109/SOSE.2017.35
[9] https://doi.org/10.1109/SOSE.2017.35
[10] https://gavwood.com/paper.pdf
[11] https://doi.org/10.1109/SOSE.2017.35
[12] https://doi.org/10.1109/SOSE.2017.35
[13] https://gavwood.com/paper.pdf
[14] https://www.bittorrent.com
[15] https://swarm-gateways.net/bzz:/theswarm.eth/
[21] https://proofofexistence.com
[25] https://doi.org/10.1109/SOSE.2017.35
[26] https://www.artmarket.guru/le-journal/blockchain/blockchain-companies/