SBIR Phase I: IP Programmable Rights Units On Blockchains

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to revolutionize global participation in the intellectual property ecosystem. This company's innovation signifies a paradigm shift in how society comprehends and manages intellectual property, paving the way for increased value creation and democratizing a system historically marred by complexity, cost, and opacity. Leveraging the inherent characteristics of blockchains—decentralization, peer-to-peer dynamics, transparency, and cryptographic verifiability it is possible to establish an open, efficient, and inclusive system for intellectual property licensing and transactions. This project’s innovation will break down barriers, both legal and economic, for creators across diverse fields, including artists, writers, filmmakers, and scientific and business innovators. Technical understanding of cost-efficient blockchain based platforms, today one of the biggest barriers to large scale blockchain based use cases, will be enhanced due to the efforts of this project. Additionally, enhanced technical understanding of composable legal representations and models while maintaining business meaning will be achieved. The global intellectual property rights market is projected to be $21B by 2029 and the blockchain token/NFT market is projected to be $211B by 2030. This disruptive enabling technology has significant commercial potential. This SBIR Phase I project proposes to demonstrate the ability to deconstruct intensely complex prose based legal constructs representing intellectual property rights into “programmable rights units” and operate these units on any blockchain in a compute efficient and cost efficient manner. The objectives are twofold. First, the project will accurately deconstruct prose-based legal documents into composable IP licensing elements, “programmable rights units,” and represent them in non-lossy semantic meanings. These deconstructed units must be capable of execution on blockchains in a commercially viable way. Second, the project will demonstrate the ability to implement composable programmable rights in a blockchain-agnostic form. This objective is crucial for commercial success as the proliferation of blockchains will continue, thus, supporting many blockchains is required for a broad addressable market. These objectives will require usage of modeling techniques, linguistic pattern analysis (natural language processing and otherwise), technical architectural cost impact analysis as well as algorithmic evaluation of leading edge technologies such as zero knowledge proofs and cryptographically independently verifiable artifacts and identities. The anticipated results will be a proven, blockchain agonistic platform that accurately represents the semantic meaning of complex IP rights business models that can be automatically interacted with for executing commercial transactions. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.