Abstract
This chapter critically investigates the application of blockchain technology for intellectual property management. To date, there have been relatively few critical discussions of the feasibility of utilising blockchain technology for this purpose, although much has been written, in media and industry sources, about the potential. Our aim, by contrast, is to examine possible limitations—and, subsequently, to suggest tentative solutions to the limitations we identify. Specifically, this chapter aims to examine the use of blockchain technology for intellectual property management from two perspectives: operation and implementation. We conclude that, while commentators often focus on technical characteristics of blockchain technology itself, it is the incentive design—which was fundamental to the original Bitcoin proposal—that is also critical to truly decentralised, and disintermediated, intellectual property management.
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- 1.
More precisely, blockchain is pseudo-immutable because the accumulation of sequential blocks just makes tampering difficult (not impossible) through computational complexity, and we can roll back the stored record when blockchain is managed by a TTP.
- 2.
This extension has a novelty in that we can prove existence or ownership without disclosing the data on the contents by adopting a hash function.
- 3.
At the time of writing, the authors are not aware of platforms that have decentralised all three service layers identified in the implementation section below.
- 4.
Decentralised applications: an app with the backend code running on a decentralisedpeer-to-peer network, rather than a centralised server.
- 5.
Note also that the realisation of decentralised payments needs additional fees as an incentive to the validators, such as transaction fees on Bitcoin and GAS on Ethereum. Thus, more precisely, we need to consider this cost as well as the price fluctuation risk in order for artists’ royalty maximisation.
- 6.
We therefore can apply the three problems to other assets that have similar characteristics, such as real estate, jewellery and even supply chain management.
- 7.
See Peterson et al. (2018) for more details of the consensus-building. Although it is not explicitly mentioned in the original paper, Augur’s Oracle is often called ‘distributed fact stream’.
- 8.
Note that some projects try to tokenise the external (non-native to the blockchain) assets by assuming a TTP responsible for custody of the assets (e.g. Latoken). Although this is partially contrary to the elimination of intermediaries, it will make a certain contribution to the provenance problem and the liquidity on the registered assets.
- 9.
Additionally, the approaches for redundancy (a design to handle the situation that a part of nodes is offline) are also slightly different. See each whitepaper for detail.
- 10.
Storj changed its underlying blockchain from Bitcoin to Ethereum in 2017.
- 11.
It should also be noted that while the decentralisation of storage layer will reduce the risk of data loss, it does not solve the problems of authenticityand provenance.
- 12.
For example, Ujo Music is now using Amazon S3 while developers mentioned future implementation of decentralised (and autonomous) storage systems.
- 13.
The latter has a similar structure to blockchain.
- 14.
See McConaghy et al. (2016) for detail. Note that this whitepaper is no longer a living document according to the project members, and they are now writing a new updated version which is unavailable at the time the authors are writing this chapter in March, 2018.
- 15.
McConaghy and Holtzman (2015), the whitepaper of Ascribe, already mentioned the outline of BigchainDB.
- 16.
See Lakshman and Malik (2010) for detail.
- 17.
See Roselfeld (2012) for further detail of this approach called ‘colored coin’.
- 18.
User is defined as ‘externally owned account’ in the context of Ethereum.
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Ito, K., O’Dair, M. (2019). A Critical Examination of the Application of Blockchain Technology to Intellectual Property Management. In: Treiblmaier, H., Beck, R. (eds) Business Transformation through Blockchain. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99058-3_12
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