Shenzhen Golden Idea Cultural and Creative Co., Ltd. v Hangzhou Bigverse Technology Co., Ltd. is the world’s first completed case about copyright infringement of non-fungible token (NFT) works in which a final judgment has been rendered. In this case, the Chinese court explored many legal issues related to NFT works based on an in-depth investigation of NFTs’ transaction process and business model. First, it clarified the legal nature of NFT works. Second, it made explicit judgments on the rights and obligations of related parties such as users, internet platforms, NFT distributors and copyright owners. Third, it clarified the duty of care and legal responsibilities of NFT trading platforms. Lastly, it affirmed the measure of disconnecting the link and blackholing the address of the uploaded NFT information to maximize the effect of stopping the dissemination of infringing content.
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.
In this chapter, students consider ethical arguments and justifications invoked to describe the institution of property ownership and then consider whether such arguments which describe the acquisition of tangible assets like land can be invoked to describe the ownership of nontangible assets. Here, we define critical terms in the discussion of IP issues – including fair use, economic right, moral right, piracy, and intellectual property. This chapter also describes new technologies used to secure one’s claim to intellectual property ownership – including digital watermarking and the creation of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). Finally, students learn to apply virtue ethics, utilitarian, and deontological lenses in thinking through the ethical issues of intellectual property.
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.
Gianluca Zanella, Charles Zhechao Liu, Kim‐Kwang Raymond Choo
Patent analysis is crucial for technology monitoring, forecasting, and assessment, and facilitates entrepreneurs and different stakeholder groups to develop forward-looking technologies and business strategies. However, the speed and scale in the development of disruptive technologies, such as blockchain, present a challenge for analysts and experts. In this article, we propose an unsupervised systematic patent analysis framework that applies a mixture of cosine-based and density-based outlier analysis to the patent space. A sample of 13 393 blockchain-related patents published between January 2014 and June 2020 is used to test the proposed framework. Specifically, this framework merges cosine and density-based outlier detection methodologies to improve the identification of outliers within clusters of patents. The identified outliers are visualized through an age-outlier technology-opportunity analysis map that represents the different levels of novelty existing in each cluster of the patent sample. The map facilitates companies to better target their R&D efforts and maximize the return of technology investments. Benchmark results show that the proposed outlier detection method improves recall, precision, and f1 score. In addition, the results show that the cluster with a higher percentage of outliers represents the Internet of Things applications of blockchain technology.
Abstract Blockchain has been regarded as an emerging global technological phenomenon. This study uses the patent analysis method to compare the development of blockchain technology in China and the USA. An overview of blockchain policies in China and the USA is presented. Our analyses suggest that policies related to the blockchain stimulate the number of blockchain patent applications and create regional innovation in China. The innovation capability of Chinese enterprises has been more affected by these policies than that of the USA, which is reflected in the fact that Chinese enterprises have become key players in China and actively carry out patent layout in the USA. Although the developmental trend of blockchain technology in China and the USA is almost identical, the USA attaches more importance to safety technology, whereas China pays more attention to the application technology based on the differences in policies.
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.