Using Blockchain and IoT Technologies to Enhance Intellectual Property Protection

Abstract

The Blockchain technology provides a way to record transactions or any digital interaction that is designed to be secure, tamper-proof, transparent, highly resistant to outages, traceable and auditable. The Internet of Things (IoT) technology is able to link computing devices, mechanical and digital machines, objects, animals or people that are provided with unique identifiers (UIDs) and provides the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction. These features encourage us to explore the combined application of IoT and Blockchain-based technology. In this paper, we propose a system architecture of blockchain and IoT based intellectual property protection system, which can process three types of intellectual property: 1) Patents, Copyrights, Trademarks etc.; 2) Industrial design, Trade dress, Craft works, Trade secrets etc.; and 3) Plant variety rights, Geographical indications etc. Using blockchain P2P network and IoT devices, the system can help us to establish a trusted, self-organized, open and ecological intellectual property protection system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that applying blockchain technology and IoT technology on traditional intellectual property protection and trade ecosystem.