The Role of Blockchain in Intellectual Property Rights and Digital Asset Protection

Abstract

There is a growing fear and concern of violation of the intellectual property rights (IPR) and theft of digital properties with the increase in the presence of digital contents and assets. The IPR protection traditional practices face multiple issues, which include, among others, that they are costly, jurisdiction issues, dilemmas of proving who gets what and respectability (Gervais, 2019). This article discusses the use of block chain technology that can reshape defense of digital assets and the management of IPR. Because it has already been discussed in earlier written work (De Filippi and Wright, 2018), blockchain enables composing of immutable and decentered ledgers, which can be consumerized in raising transparency or trust. The approach that is expected to be undertaken in this research is a design science model in which the usage of smart contracts and consensus algorithm akin to those dismantled by Swan (2015) will be employed. With the aid of the traditional models, the prototype blockchain-based IPR registry was designed and tested. The result reveals that it has major gains in traceability and efficiency in dispute resolution as recorded by O Dair et al. (2016) on the creative industries. These findings show that, in fact, the technological assistance to keep digital content safe and carry out IPR all over the planet is a possibility via blockchain. The future researchers should aim at addressing the barriers to mass implementation through scale/related reductions and harmonization of regulation (Tapscott & Tapscott, 2017).

Keywords: blockchain, intellectual property rights, digital assets, smart contracts,

decentralized ledger, digital rights management.