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by RyanCavanaugh 1677 days ago
If you have a "unified 'IP Registry'", as you (I think correctly) posit would be useful, why does it have to be done with a blockchain?

Blockchains are useful for decentralized decisions, but decentralization is antithetical to the kind of thing you would need in order to take an IP claim to court. If you and another person with alleged IP claims to the same work but different registries show up to court, the court has no way to determine which registrar is authoritative for that work, and will ignore both of you. IP without government enforcement is literally useless, so your IP rights are nothing.

This is why property records, patents, etc. aren't decentralized. You and another person can't both have a legitimate claim to the same patent based on two different patent decentralized blockchain records, as cool as that concept might sound technically.

And once a system is unified, it doesn't need to be a blockchain. You can just have a simple database.
1 comments
cwkoss 1677 days ago
In terms of "unified IP registry' I'm not talking about a single centralized organisation, but a super-ecosystem of multiple sub- NFT ecosystems:

- Each do due diligence of creator ownership before an NFT can be sold on their platform.

- In addition, they test the candidate-NFT against the file and perceptual hashes on other trusted peer ecosystems

- Due diligence signatures are portable and transferrable, so ex. Sotheby's validation could be used as evidence when token is resold within OpenSea ecosystem - even if Sotheby's was to hypothetically disappear (assuming old signatures are still trustworthy).

(caveat: Perceptual hashes are starting to push past my technical expertise, not sure to what extent perceptual hashes would be economically feasible: can they be specific enough to not cause excessive false positives while still identifying true positive subtle image manipulations without drastically increasing on-chain storage costs?)

I think the benefits of decentralization would be nice, but it's certainly arguable that an ICANN-like international centralized consortium could be a better solution - it certainly can be more energy and cost efficient but at the expense of that entity being a single point of failure.

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