Intellectual Property, Blockchains, and Smart Contracts: A Brief Review of Their Relationships and Interactions

Abstract

This article presents a literature review of various solutions and analyses concerning the use of blockchains and/or smart contracts to manage aspects of intellectual property assets. These include proper registration to establish prior art, ownership traceability, copy control, payment automation, contract execution, and related functions. The analyses focus on the application of these technologies to copyright, industrial property, sui generis protection, and technology transfer agreements. The methodology comprised a keyword search in scientific databases, followed by a qualitative content analysis to extract the most relevant points from each document. Overall, the findings indicate that most proposed applications address copyright-related issues, followed by patent-related uses. In the majority of proposed solutions, blockchain registration is restricted to information about the asset, without necessarily storing the asset itself on the blockchain.