In recent years, propelled by societal transformations and technological advancements, emerging technologies founded upon diverse disciplines such as financial and information technology have rapidly evolved. Identifying the trends associated with these emerging technologies and extracting their salient topics is crucial in order to accurately grasp the developmental trajectory of these tools and for their efficient utilization. In this study, we chronologically categorize information derived from five types of multi-source data, including journal articles, patent inventions, and industry reports, into distinct periods. We employ the LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) topic model to identify emerging technological themes within these periods and utilize a dual-index theme lifecycle analysis method to construct a hotspot theme distribution map, thereby facilitating the extraction of significant themes. Through empirical research on blockchain financial technology, we ultimately identify 22 thematic areas of blockchain finance and extracted eight prominent themes, including financial technology, cross-border payments, digital invoices, supply chain finance, and decentralization. By analyzing these themes alongside their respective popularity levels, we validate that the methods above can be used to effectively identify emerging technological hotspots and illuminate their developmental directions.
Los sistemas tecnológicos y judiciales han revolucionado por los Non-Fungible Tokens (en adelante NFTs por sus siglas en inglés). Características como la infungibilidad y uso de blockchain, crean tensiones jurídicas entre NFT y los derechos de autor. Entre los dilemas jurídicos están las crecientes incerti- dumbres sobre los activos digitales que pueden ser protegidos, la propiedad del contenido y la cesión de derechos de autor. Este estudio se centra en la ley de derechos de autor ecuatoriana y desafíos a los que se enfrenta cuando los NFT entran al mercado. Este artículo responde a la pregunta sobre la adecuación de las leyes de derechos de autor de Ecuador y normas conexas para el manejo de las controversias sobre NFT. Analiza el impacto que tiene sobre el token digital y sus derechos de autor entre compradores y vendedores, además de los reglamentos de las plataformas que emiten y comercializan tokens digitales. Examina los derechos del creador, así como los derechos de los compradores, y cómo afectan a los derechos de autor. Por último, se concluye que, si bien la ley ecuatoriana no regula directamente los NFT, es posible regular sus contro- versias mediante artículos conexos e integración de otras normas.
Abstract Amid the surge of intellectual property (IP) disputes surrounding non‐fungible tokens (NFTs), some scholars have advocated for the application of personal property or sales law to regulate NFT minting and transactions, contending that IP laws unduly hinder the development of the NFT market. This Article counters these proposals and argues that the existing IP system stands as the most suitable regulatory framework for governing the evolving NFT market. Compared to personal property or sales law, IP laws can more effectively address challenges such as tragedies of the commons and anticommons in the NFT market. NFT communities have also developed their own norms and licensing agreements upon existing IP laws to regulate shared resources. Moreover, the IP regimes, with both static and dynamic institutional designs, can effectively balance various policy concerns, such as innovation, fair competition, and consumer protection, which alternative proposals struggle to provide.
Abstract The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has made it increasingly difficult to protect and enforce intellectual property (IP) rights in a digital landscape where content can be easily accessed and utilized without clear authorization. First, we explain why LLMs make it uniquely difficult to protect and enforce IP, creating a ‘tragedy of the commons.’ Second, drawing on theories of polycentric governance, we argue that non-fungible tokens (NFTs) could be effective tools for addressing the complexities of digital IP rights. Third, we provide an illustrative case study that shows how NFTs can facilitate dispute resolution of IP on the blockchain.
Blockchain technology supporting cryptocurrency transactions is one of the most critical innovations of this decade. Establishing a legal identity on blockchain, however, is fraught with uncertainty. In the 1990s, the internet faced a similar set of issues, which were resolved through the ICANN dispute resolution system. This Article asserts that blockchain technology urgently needs a similar cohesive approach to NFT domains. This Article will explore trademark issues with non-fungible tokens (NFTs), specifically NFT domains. It begins by exploring the fundamental structure of NFTs by demystifying the technology and showing how NFTs contrast with other currency regimes. Increased usage of NFTs has created novel intellectual property law issues. This Article then examines the history of unauthorized registration and use of domains identical or similar to trademarks, known as cybersquatting. Understanding the historical evolution of the internet domain name system is a crucial step in comprehending the risks associated with NFT domains disputes. Traditional internet domain names are ultimately managed and overseen by a centralized authority, ICANN, which is a private nonprofit organization that sets the policy for the global Domain Name System. Unlike internet domain names, where ICANN developed a Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy and collision occurrence management framework, NFT domains have the potential to create domain collisions, both between extensions on the blockchain and with conventional domain name extensions. As the blockchain ecosystem continues to grow, its unregulated nature may increase the number of disputes and stoke mistrust in the system. This Article will compare two principal naming standards, centralized and decentralized. Despite the challenges of coordination in the decentralized world of blockchain, I argue that in the absence of law regulations, an effective system of governance is possible through self-regulatory organizations. Given the specific characteristics of the blockchain environment, I propose to establish a specialized blockchain entity, a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), that would deal with the governance of NFT domains and disputes relating to their collisions and those arising from their intersection with trademarks.
BACKGROUND: Intellectual property (IP) is a substantial competitive advantage in the health care industry. However, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for open innovation and collaboration for the greater good. Despite this, the industry faces challenges with innovation owing to organizational and departmental barriers. A secure platform is necessary to facilitate IP sharing without compromising the rights of IP owners. OBJECTIVE: This study proposes a blockchain-based framework to secure IP transactions in health care and bring social impact. METHODS: This study reviews existing researches, publications, practical cases, firm and organization websites, and conferences related to blockchain technology, blockchain in health care, blockchain in IP management, IP pledge research, and practice of IP management blockchain. The platform architecture has 7 components: pledgers, advanced research technology (ART), IP pledge platforms, IP databases, health care research, seeking ART, and transaction condition setting. These components work together seamlessly to support the sharing and pledging of ART and knowledge, while ensuring the platform's transparency, security, and trust. RESULTS: The open IP pledge framework can promote technology dissemination and use, reduce research and development costs, foster collaboration, and serve the public interest. Medical organizations' leadership and support and active participation from stakeholders are necessary for success. By leveraging blockchain technology, the platform ensures tamper-proof and transparent transactions and protects the rights of IP owners. In addition, the platform offers incentive mechanisms through pledge tokens that encourage stakeholders to share their ART and contribute to the platform. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, the proposed framework can facilitate technological innovation, tackle various challenges, and secure IP transactions. It provides a secure platform for stakeholders to share their IP without compromising their rights, promoting collaboration and progress in the health care industry. The implementation of the framework has the potential to revolutionize the industry's approach to innovation, allowing a more open and collaborative environment driven by the greater good.
The potential applications of blockchain technology across various business functions and industries have generated significant interest. However, its underlying knowledge structure remains unclear. This study aimed to gain a deeper understanding of the technological domain and knowledge structure of blockchain technology by analyzing 4753 USPTO patent data from 2008 to 2019. We used multiple approaches, such as analyzing patent filing volumes, constructing co-citation networks, and examining text (patent abstract) data with a variant of bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT). The results demonstrate the advantages of using an NLP-based BERT text analysis approach for examining technological knowledge and relationships within the blockchain technology field. Our findings reveal that the field of blockchain technology is expanding and diversifying, with increasing patent filings in both cryptocurrency and distributed ledger technologies and growing knowledge similarity between these two subdomains. We also found that patent assignees (companies) engage differently in innovative activities within the blockchain technology domain based on their prior experience in the field. These results hold potential for informing future research in emerging technology studies and guiding industry and policy decisions related to blockchain technology.
Gabriel Marcuzzo do Canto Cavalheiro, Mariana Brandão Cavalheiro
The rapid and enormous market capitalization achieved by Bitcoin in recent years has also increased demand for cryptocurrencies based on blockchain technology.At present, Bitcoin and Ethereum are the leading cryptocurrencies in terms of market capitalization and trading volume.As such, those cryptocurrencies play a central role in the ongoing Decentralized Finance (DeFi) process, which regards the development of a financial ecosystem based on blockchain technology.This comparative study seeks to contribute to filing a gap in the intellectual property management literature by examining the main technological trends associated with both cryptocurrencies based the analysis of patent information.We have found that both Bitcoin and Ethereum started to become a technological hotspot from 2016 onwards, as the number of patent applications for both cryptocurrencies started to skyrocket in this particular year.We also present evidence that both Bitcoin and Ethereum patents address data processing issues, rather than hardware technologies.Furthermore, we observed that the US and China are the main patent applicants regarding Bitcoin, while China is by far the leading applicant of Ethereum patents.
Open-source software has made a breakthrough in the traditional intellectual property theory from the aspects of Copyright, patent right, and trademark right, and it has created a new property rights form in the form of license. Taking blockchain as an example, this paper analyzes bitcoin and Ethereum and their open-source licensing strategies. At the same time, it explores the problems encountered in the property rights of open-source blockchain and three possible solutions to this dilemma: The industry-standard licensing plan, blockchain open-source licensing scheme, and open patent scheme. This research will be significant for expanding and enriching the theoretical and practical analysis of blockchain open source in the field of intellectual property.
The software industry's history is also its future. Its history has been defined by both abundance and scarcity, and its future will be, too. In the 1970s and 80s, perceived software scarcity led U.S. legislators to formally grant intellectual property protections to software creators. Later, a different kind of scarcity-a lack of access to source code-led the founders of the free and open source software movement to flip intellectual property protections on their head in an effort to better promote abundance. That movement proved wildly successful, with today's software industry based on vast amounts of freely available open source software resources that both organizations and individuals collaboratively build. Abundance and scarcity will also define software's future, but in different ways. The abundance that the open source software movement spawned is in the midst of a significant commercial phase. That sometimes means that commercial competitors bring to the table a scarcity mindset that conflicts with the norms that made that movement so successful. Intellectual property concerns at times derail what may otherwise be even greater software abundance. And because so much software is moving into the Cloud, trade secrecy may become the software industry's most important form of intellectual property to the extent the industry abandons open models of innovation. The software industry's growing dependence on artificial intelligence (AI) is likely to contribute to these trends. The software industry is increasingly becoming synonymous with the AI industry, as more and more software companies either rely on AI in running their services or provide AI products to the public. As with all software, these AI technologies are increasingly provided from the Cloud, where trade secrecy is not only possible, but often preferable. But trade secrecy may be even more likely in the AI context because much of the magic in implementing AI systems lies in the know-how to piece them together from available open source software resources, decades-old AI techniques, and data. Hence, to the extent that software and AI technologists spurn open innovation in favor of a scarcity mindset, trade secrecy is likely to become its dominant form of legal protection. The advent of web3 technologies may eventually change some of these trends. But for now, increasing secrecy seems the most likely outcome. I conclude by arguing that this shift to secrecy is likely preferable to other forms of intellectual property.
Research and Development (R&D) in the pharmaceutical sector traditionally occurred in closed, siloed institutional settings. This approach was a function of a rights-oriented intellectual property model which framed access and reuse of data (data sharing) as a threat to rightsholders. However, a closed model of explorative collaboration is less suited to today’s more complex scientific ecosystem, where external engagement and dynamic partnering with multiple actors and diverse information sources has become essential. As such, devising alternative approaches is vital in ensuring that opportunities for scientific advances are not lost or innovation stifled. This article introduces a hybrid contractual framework that combines the benefits of the automated functionality of smart contracts and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) embedded in a blockchain with more traditional rights-based licensing schemes. The presented framework is based on the outcome of an experimental pilot platform that enabled participants to store, find and reuse data following FAIR data principles. The platform documents real-world physical assets in the drug discovery of chemical molecules in an immutable digital ledger. More generally, smart contracts and NFTs point us towards an open and global collaborative platform for exploiting and advancing drug research assets. The resulting platform creates mechanisms for resolving issues regarding standardization, interoperability, and disclosure. As such, it overcomes many of the practical hurdles currently obstructing collaboration in pharmaceutical R&D, as well as providing a framework to address the central conflict in drug discovery, namely the demand for greater data sharing and the protection of rightsholder interests.
Abstract The viability of exponentially growing non-fungible token (NFT) market is evaluated by identifying potential value-generating mechanisms that can be rationalized. After identifying the value-generating mechanisms underlying the positive values of NFTs, this study establishes a pricing model for NFTs that follows a continuous-time financial framework. As NFTs are claimed to securitize “ownership rights short of use”, and as such they may potentially serve as a substitute for the need to rely replace the reliance on the legal protection provided by intellectual property rights (IPRs). Considering this issue, this study evaluates the likelihood that NFTs will replace existing mechanisms that protect producers’ rightful claim to use their assets or the need to apply the legal code that governs IPRs. The financial condition for this potential shift is derived for a category of assets whose use or consumption does not reduce supply as the notion of scarcity does not apply.
Customs surveillance of intellectual property is an efficient way to quickly and effectively provide legal protection to the right-holder, as it allows to nip the infringements in the bud. Technology has drastically changed the means and mechanisms of customs enforcement, as it increases the possibilities of identifying and detaining goods infringing IPRs, and makes it more feasible to assess in advance where control is required. However, assessing in advance and acting when appropriate does not always match well with fundamental intellectual property principles (territoriality), global trade norms (freedom of transit), global intellectual property rules, and due process requirements. This chapter explores some of the challenges and opportunities brought by AI, big data and distributed ledger technologies to customs enforcement of IPRs. It looks at AI’s transformative influence on IP enforcement and the digitization and use of big data in customs control.
Information technologies (ITs) have been playing an important role in improving our society, and the fast evolution of ITs creates a competitive environment not only for companies but also for regions. Hence, recognizing the future trend of technologies can be effective in decision-making with regard to technology selection and investment. Blockchain technology with its vast and impressive applications has received considerable attention from researchers, investors, and public agencies. The purpose of this research is to investigate blockchain technology to explore its trends according to their classification by use of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) database. Furthermore, we particularly evaluate the registered patents in the world's most well-known patent databases such as the USA patent database. We drew the current technology trends in blockchain patents by applying the text mining and clustering approach. The results represent that the registered patents in the USA patent database have been achieved in the growth phase. That means, attention to the blockchain is rising nowadays and most patents focused the cryptocurrencies and their applications in finance. However, blockchain technology is in the emergence phase and is evolving by researchers and inventors.
Tracking scientific and technological (S&T) research hotspots can help scholars to grasp the status of current research and develop regular patterns in the field over time. It contributes to the generation of new ideas and plays an important role in promoting the writing of scientific research projects and scientific papers. Patents are important S&T resources, which can reflect the development status of the field. In this paper, we use topic modeling, topic intensity, and evolutionary computing models to discover research hotspots and development trends in the field of blockchain patents. First, we propose a time-based dynamic latent Dirichlet allocation (TDLDA) modeling method based on a probabilistic graph model and knowledge representation learning for patent text mining. Second, we present a computational model, topic intensity (TI), that expresses the topic strength and evolution. Finally, the point-wise mutual information (PMI) value is used to evaluate topic quality. We obtain 20 hot topics through TDLDA experiments and rank them according to the strength calculation model. The topic evolution model is used to analyze the topic evolution trend from the perspectives of rising, falling, and stable. From the experiments we found that 8 topics showed an upward trend, 6 topics showed a downward trend, and 6 topics became stable or fluctuated. Compared with the baseline method, TDLDA can have the best effect when K is 40 or less. TDLDA is an effective topic model that can extract hot topics and evolution trends of blockchain patent texts, which helps researchers to more accurately grasp the research direction and improves the quality of project application and paper writing in the blockchain technology domain.
Sohee Kim, Sejun Yoon, Nagarajan Raghavan, Nguyen-Truong Le · 5 authors
The blockchain is a technology with high growth potential that increases social benefits by streamlining procedures, reducing costs, and innovating the way we work. Considering the growth potential of blockchain technologies, countries around the world are attempting to graft into various fields such as finance, logistics, and healthcare, and actively promoting technology development. Tracing and analyzing the developmental trajectories of blockchain technology can give great insight for R&D direction and strategies. We developed an improved knowledge persistence-based main path approach to identify technological trajectories of the blockchain technology. In addition, future technological directions for each sub-technology under blockchain technology were identified by the knowledge unconventionality metric. The results show that the blockchain technology can be divided into five sub-technologies, and each sub-technology has evolved with high technological interactions among other sub-technologies. Based on the last knowledge streams of the main paths, this paper suggests potential future directions for each sub-technology in the blockchain technology.