Blockchain and IP Law: A Primer Tyler Harkness – Tonkon Torp

What we’re talking about today A Short History of Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain IP Law and Blockchain Building Enterprise Value Through IP Development

The Story of Bitcoin Started in 2008 with a White Paper published by Satoshi Nakamoto. https://twitter.com/themysteryman7 http://www.hangthebankers.com/iceland-jails-bankers/

The Story of Bitcoin No Fraudulent Record Tampering Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash with no Third Party Intermediaries No Fraudulent Record Tampering https://medium.com/@qjawe/what-is-a-blockchain-distributed-ledger-technology-1d77c24ca27c

The Story of Bitcoin No Fraudulent Double Spending Verifying Transactions Mining Blocks in the Blockchain https://cryptovest.com/news/bitcoin-mining-hotels-in-vogue-among-russian-crypto-miners/ No Fraudulent Double Spending

What is Blockchain A gigantic, brutally inefficient computer that does everything poorly, except for one thing that it does exceptionally well.

The Story of Ethereum Started in 2014 with an ICO by Vitalik Buterin

The Story of Ethereum Allows developing smart contracts http://bitcoinist.com/crypto-community-service-dev-escrow/ https://thebitcoinnews.com/opporty-ethereum-based-market-place-with-decentralized-escrow-system/

Some Definitions Smart Contracts Tokens ICOs

ICOs What are they? How do they happen? Who is doing them?

Proprietary Blockchain Inventory Management Health Care and Privacy Data Management Insurance Claim verification Voting Systems Real Estate Records IoT Decentralized File Storage Financial Markets Payment Systems Cross-Border Payments

Intellectual Property IP Law andBlockchain Patents Trademarks Copyrights Proprietary Intellectual Property

Patents Needs to be Novel and Nonobvious Needs to be Patent Eligible The Satoshi Whitepaper… and the subsequent proliferation of public Blockchain projects and publically disseminated white papers related to new projects. Needs to be Patent Eligible More than a mere concept or abstract idea Inventive component – does it introduce new, or improve, computer functionality

Patents

Patents

Patents: Additional Resources The Patentability of Blockchain Technology and the Future of Innovation. By Inayat Chaudhry Published in Landslide, Vol. 10, No. 4, March/April 2018

How IP Law Impacts Blockchain Patents Trademarks Copyrights Proprietary Intellectual Property

Trademarks Ostensibly the least relevant Because nothing really changes when dealing with Blockchain products and services. Even ideas related to managing Intellectual Property assets are less concrete in this space than in others.

Copyrights Copyrights related to software code Open Source Software Licensing Public Blockchain projects, and business built on them or interacting with them, implicate open source licenses for the software used to develop the Blockchain infrastructure. Some significant projects use Apache or MIT Ethereum ambiguously incorporates restrictive GPL licenses into critical components of its code infrastructure.

Intellectual Property Blockchain and IP Law Patents Trademarks Copyrights Proprietary Intellectual Property

Proprietary IP Trade Secrets and other IP deriving value from not being generally known. Complicated by the nature of distributed ledger technology Businesses developed on public blockchain need to publish critical pieces to the blockchain, which become publically available.

IP and Enterprise Value Smart Contract published to the Ethereum Blockchain GUI Proprietary IP Value REP ETHEREUM Trademark Value Blockchain infrastructure; Opensource licensing Implicated when integrating Dapp.

IP and Enterprise Value Smart Contract and Token App/GUI Proprietary IP Value GRAM TON Trademark Value Unpermissioned Blockchain infrastructure independently developed Proprietary IP Value

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