You’re undoubtedly aware of how simple it is for your work to be stolen online if you design, write, or create any content that is safeguarded by Intellectual Property (IP) legislation. As if catching criminals wasn’t difficult enough, exercising your constitutional rights as the producer of the material is contingent on proving your ownership.
Although copyright law safeguards your work, there has not been a definite registration procedure to show ownership up until now. Fortunately, this is changing thanks to blockchain.
Blockchain is the system behind Bitcoin’s functionality. But, more crucially, it provides creative individuals with an innovative and effective way to secure their intellectual property rights.
Blockchain technology is useful for protecting intellectual property in the following ways:
- As an IP registry
Blockchain may be used as a technology-based IP, allowing IP owners to preserve their intellectual property’s hashed digital certificates and utilize it to get royalties from anybody who uses their works or innovations through a smart contract. Patent offices as well as other regulatory organizations sometimes have lengthy approval wait times. This delay may jeopardize the first-mover edge, since incumbents need to act quickly to guard their discoveries and intellectual property. By switching from centralized to decentralized registration systems, it will be simpler to license new intellectual property, amend filings, and sell property rights at any time. This allows regulatory bodies to run more efficiently with less resources.
- Version control maintenance
Since digital assets such as patents, copyrights, scientific papers, and so on have various versions and upgrades during their lifespan, a solution that enables multiple copies of these is critical. Blockchain technology may be utilized in systems that employ blockchain ledger technology to correlate all asset versions and possibly use this as end-to-end cycle maintenance.
- Unifying patent offices
Decentralized ledger technologies may help solve the challenge of integrating the patent system among nations, considerably improving the efficacy of IP management, accelerating the invention process, and fostering information sharing among them via the ledger. Patent offices and legislators are now working to embrace blockchain recordings as acceptable evidence. Arizona, for example, modified its Electronic Transaction Act in 2017 to cover blockchain records, smart contracts, and signatures. Ohio approved a similar ordinance a year later.
- Determining Creatorship, Ownership, and Origin of Content
There really is no adequate means for authors to catalog their content in the conventional framework. This makes copyright ownership difficult to confirm. It is even challenging for creators to determine who is utilizing their work. It is also difficult for third parties to identify whom to approach for a license. Copyrights could exist automatically with blockchain upon the production of the original work, and anybody who wants to utilize it would have to properly engage the originator.
- Protecting IP
The use of blockchain technology provides for a tamper-proof collection of evidence regarding copyrighted material. If the data here on block is changed, the hash value of such a block changes. However, the following block retains the original version of hash value connecting the original block, alerting the system to interference. Blockchain, in addition to being vandal-proof, allows you to track the ownership of the original piece. If a copyright rights claim is ever questioned, then data in the block could be retrieved to verify who owns the IP.
Final Word
As automation undermines the livelihood of the people throughout the world, it is more crucial than ever to safeguard the unique asset, which is the human imagination. Please visit us and let us help you protect your IP with blockchain technology.
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