Smart Contracts: legal frontiers and insertion into the Creative Economy

Abstract

The ultimate development of a disruptive and innovative contractual form has been imposing new challenges and the need of a proper regulatory framework in the legal field. Smart contracts consist on an internet protocol in which programming language and digital codes are used to input clauses that had already been agreed by the parties and that, upon the fulfillment of a determined condition previously established, shall be automatically self-executed. This new way of creating, transferring and extinguishing patrimonial rights and duties has been playing a major role in the context of the Creative Economy, in which intellectual capital, agility and the automatization of operations constitute fundamental factors. In order to investigate the characteristics and possibilities of adopting smart contracts under the perspective of the Brazilian legal order and its insertion in the Creative Economy, this paper has applied the theoretical and methodological framework of the Economic Analysis of Law so as to pursue the analytical exercise that it is committed to perform.