Automating Intellectual Property License Agreements with DLT

Abstract

Intellectual Property license agreements management is a business process that has still to be fully digitized and benefit from the derived advantages. To close this gap, in this paper we show how license agreements can be modernized and improved by Distributed Ledger Technology. We implement and refine the idea of representing a license agreement's logic with a smart contract. The obtained “Smart License” is executed by a DLT network following the contract specified logic, so without the possibility of being tampered with by its interested parties. This allows for licensing royalties to be computed in a transparent, trustworthy, and accurate way. The proposed approach further improves the IP licensing field by removing the need for audits, enabling novel business models too complex for traditional solutions, and reducing licensing costs, thus allowing for cheaper and wider participation to IP licensing markets. Beside studying the main concept of Smart License, we provide a possible architecture for its implementation and present an evaluation of a proof of concept implementation on Ethereum.