Tokenizing Literary Assets: Blockchain Applications in Intellectual Property Management

Abstract

The era of digital transformation is still active and Blockchain is a disruptive force to realign traditional models of governance of intellectual property. Today, some of the brightest applications emerging in this format relate to literary assets through tokenization—that is, creating digital tokens for books, manuscripts, articles, and other types of creative works, which act as a proof of ownership, authenticity, and proper usage rights on an open, decentralized ledger. We will show the promised radical and enhanced transparency, security, and efficiency of the blockchain as a platform for literary IP management in the digital age. Tokenization refers to the creation of a digital token representing rights or ownership of an underlying real-world or crypto asset securely locked in a blockchain. Tokenizing gives authors, publishers, and content creators a uniform way to contain their work immutably on the blockchain — producing irrefutable proof of creation and date using an owning property like literature. This solution avoids the problems that exist around copyright disputes, plagiarism and even improper reproduction, since every transaction and ownership change is linked to the blockchain and can be time-stamped. Decentralization The decentralization in IP management is one of the main benefits due to by condition. In terms of rights management, traditional systems are managed (e.g. publishing houses, copyright offices, etc.) by third parties, whereas on blockchain, data can be shared directly between the reporting parties (ex: authors, publishers, etc.) to reduce intermediary cost as peer-to-peer transactions take place. Smart contracts — self-executing agreements encoded on the blockchain — could also automate licensing agreements, royalty payments and rights transfers. By embedding the contract terms, creators receive the right payment on the right time without third-party verification. Moreover, authors can fraction their tokenized literary assets and sell the share of their writings to investors or fans. This would offer a new avenue for financing creative endeavors, since authors could fund works by selling ownership of a portion of future royalties or resale values. It also allows secondary markets of literary content or the buying, selling or trading of tokens, and it adds liquidity to a usually illiquid space. There are obstacles, however, to the use of blockchain in literary IP management. - Many jurisdictions are still coming to terms with how blockchain-based IP rights will work with existing legal structures, and development of such legal certainty around how new digital tokens iterate on established copyright laws has yet to be seen.