What is IP?
The world's most misunderstood asset class.
What is IP?
IP is the world's most misunderstood asset class. When one hears the word IP for the first time, they typically think of Hollywood films or Billboard charts. That's confusing a single tree with the entire forest: IP is much more.
IP is the intersection where AI and blockchains will collide. And as AI grows more powerful, IP as we know it will die. But before diving into the future of IP, it's crucial to understand what it is.
My definition of IP: Intellectual Property is the atomic unit of ingenuity.
IP is scientific research (Merck, Pfizer, J&J), IP is the most iconic logos in the world (Nike, Louis Vuitton, Coca-Cola), IP is the best of creativity (Disney, BTS, Pokemon), and most personally, IP is your unique name, image, and likeness (Beyonce, Trump, Messi).
All of this constitutes a staggering 61 trillion USD asset class — comfortably one of the world's largest.
Beyond the commercial lens, IP is as fundamental to civilization as property itself: it is the collective vault of our ingenuity as a species.
Think of the Wright Brothers, the Mona Lisa, the discovery of penicillin, the first ever Nike shoe, the invention of the transistor, and the architecture behind DeepMind's AI models.
The most valuable IPs, if strung together chronologically, create a pretty comprehensive documentary of our rise as a species, and the entire world is racing to create the next IP that will usher in a new chapter of that ongoing human story.
IP is something that billion-dollar companies live and die by, that nations have gone to war over, and countless battles have been decided by the superiority of the victor's IP. IP is the gold, the oil, the silicon of the world of ideas.
Yet as AI grows more powerful, IP as we know it is dead.
Models are eating the grassy fields of internet data like an invasive species, and no one is incentivized to plant new seeds to keep the field alive. Without adequate compensation, no IP holder will ever grow ideas in this field again, knowing that it will simply get eaten away by the invasive species without consideration or reward.
This is tragic, because property rights are absolutely critical to flourishing societies. There are many accounts showing that nations that enforce and respect property vastly outperform their neighbors despite very similar starting points.
Yet AI as it currently stands, without blockchains, is creating a new Napster moment where our intellectual property is being disrespected without any compensation, incentives, or assent. This is not a future where ingenuity will flourish, but rather one where it will quickly die out.
It doesn't have to be this way. I am still a deep-rooted AI optimist. I truly believe that AI will usher in another Renaissance in civilizational progress. But as AI completely reshapes the value chain, we need to find a new, internet-native way of creating property rights around ideas. We need to reincarnate a new form of IP that can supercharge AI, one that does not succumb as its predecessor did.
There is a world where IP once again becomes the store of value for genius. In fact, this world is the most economically rational. The internet has brought the marginal cost of distribution to zero, and AI now brings the marginal cost of creation near zero as well. When all of these costs are brought to zero, what becomes the moat where value aggregates? Unique and original ideas — which, if tokenized and turned into property, is IP.
The question is not whether assetized ideas should be valuable, but rather, what technology is needed to reincarnate IP for an AI age.
This is the massive question that Story answers. We are creating a hyperstructure, a permanent and foundational cryptoeconomic network that brings IP onchain and makes it programmable.
If IP does not become software, it cannot survive. Blockchains provide the only way for someone to truly own software, and therefore, to truly own IP. Story is building what we hope will be the world's largest store of IP, a new, global, and permanent Library of Alexandria.
Story will be the rails upon which a market is created around IP. By connecting the world's largest AI companies with the world's largest IP holders, Story becomes the network by which a new digital market is created. Crypto needs to expand its horizons beyond creating endless forms of new currencies, and have something meaningful to spend all that currency on. IP is by far the most exciting exogenous asset to enter into crypto, one that transcends the recursive currency bubble that crypto is currently trapped in.
And perhaps most importantly, this new form of IP is the crossroads where AI and blockchains will intersect: truly autonomous AI agents need blockchains as a substrate for interacting with property, and on Story, AI agents will be able to learn by training on all of the IP on Story, while IP holders will be incentivized to store their IP on Story in order to earn from the massive gold rush surrounding the AI arms race.
The world's scientific ideas, creative works, and most alluring symbols will all be accessible and monetizable on Story. And these transactions are mediated not by people, not by paper, but by blockchains, which are the perfect intermediary, where code becomes law, and ideas become property for a software-native, AI driven future.
I'm pretty interested with the vision of story protocol
Brother... there's a lot to say, and I'll be saying it on my own time without FUDding the decent technical work I've seen, but this ditty gets a comment:
"If IP does not become software, it cannot survive. Blockchains provide the only way for someone to truly own software, and therefore, to truly own IP."
IP has existed long before publicly-available terms, and IP will exist long after. Blockchain is a programmable notary service. That means that anybody can file their own registrations of anything they'd like in any non-fungible token without a gate or a service trying to funnel that. Every NFT is already a "PIL," as you put it, because your metadata transaction mechanics can be applied in any L2 format.
https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x495f947276749ce646f68ac8c248420045cb7b5e/88207903319044114138828574668233581092866410897349003518169250611988587922256
Property registration with public terms is inherent to all of them, and that's open-access. IP does not need to be software to survive - it needs to be respected to survive. Publicly-available terms don't protect artists, or your "applications" would appropriately be called "impact puzzles" and not try to silo off every intellectual property as licensed software.
Property is owned and developed into results across from rights and process.
Intellectual property has two measurements: labor and language.
Apply value. Respect precedent. Your language twists are inappropriate, you need to credit source material no matter how you feel about market performance, and you have to respect the generations of precedent that come before us in intellectual property development.
The precedent, onchain, is that the community build approach is called an "Impact Puzzle," not an "application." The puzzle is the result of the networked titling and development of "property," not "licenses."
The behavior is called "proof of development," not "proof of creativity," and it includes every contributor to the build. Creators, platforms, labor, and unions. Not just customers.
Unless you have PTO filings or blockchain mint dates preceding March 24th, 2021, you need to respect existing precedent in public blockchain builds before seeking to build and launch a protocol around things you've clearly learned from observation, but are seeking to discredit and devalue with your twisted language. That's an inappropriate way to approach the market and it's my current belief you're defrauding your investors and your community.
"My definition of IP: Intellectual Property is the atomic unit of ingenuity."
That's a load of crap. It's the result of labor and language. It always has been.
You're not going to be approached with honey and kindness when your language is twisted to discredit and devalue open-source material and behavioral displays. The paper is asking for attribution, applied value, and respected precedent.
Isn't that what you're seeking to enforce? The tech trees are great, but the presentation is a clown show without applying value and respecting precedent when that's exactly what you're shopping as your model. On top of that, you're not a publicly-built IP on existing precedent, but you're shopping a protocol that enforces publicly-built IP on a precedent you're deriving "from thin air," right? That's wild shit.
How old are you, exactly?
If you didn't know about LMO, I'll eat a shoe - one of your team called us "legends." We're not legends. I'm a behavioral scientist that installed the paradigm of thought for "Impact Puzzle" existence. We're STILL publishing discredited, devalued properties -- including our brand -- that are routinely obscured by exactly what you're doing. If we're truly a mystery to you, your market research skills are terrible. You still have to respect existing precedent.
I have a team that is routinely being starved out of their due by corrupt morons, and I've had enough.
Application = Impact Puzzle
Proof of Creativity = Proof of Development
Your PIL intentions = Puzzle Piece / Community Garden Plot.
Learn the difference between a license and a property title, and understand that anybody can launch either asset with a publicly-notarized deed and a few non-fungible tokens. We don't need a special chain to silo the behavior, it's the default behavior of every NFT already.
I do think the PILs are interesting, although the only use I'd have for them is splits off my NBA shots, and that would have to come with additional [redacted] automation I'm not going to explain without applied value and respected precedent.
You can't develop a scalable property build through 500,000 PILs, that's nonsensical. I'm not FUDding. You're twisting precedent to devalue and discredit, even if you don't know you are... and after a thorough study, none of our team believes you're doing this without knowing about LMO and our open-source behavioral model.
"Licensee" means "user of." The Howey qualifier is "Labor required."
"Title Owner" means "authority over."
While we're here, "member" means "subject to."
As far as I'm concerned, you've set up a siloed secondary market for "use of labor required" while pretending you're the protocol of "Impact Puzzles," which you're calling "applications" and are pretending are "software" and not just a behavioral stack that doesn't need software at all.
I'm Black and Red like the Falcons, I've already been plagiarized like 7 times, and I've left them all with a stuck blink, and that's the persona you're getting now. My "Stuck Blink" character. I think you're pretty young. You need to do better than this, no matter what your angle is.
We're all already selling "authority over labor required." That's what the LMO brand is. That's how we publish assets. That's what BAYC is. That's what Punks was, before us. All are called "Impact Puzzles." Why?
PRECEDENT. March 24th, 2021. Notary neighbors to BAYC, which notoriously launched April 20th, 2021.
You're just another in a long line of people who didn't credit their "market research" while pretending to build enforcement systems for.... credit. Like I said. Stuck blinks in boxes.
Language and labor + impartial witness = intellectual property. Zero part of that equation is "Jason's opinion." Intellectual property is not "an atomic unit of ingenuity." Say that shit out loud and try not to laugh at yourself. Jesus.
Baby Hankob the janitor, sweeping the floors at Target #412, is providing intellectual property (labor that creates results that wouldn't otherwise exist) to the existence of "Target #412 2025 Q1-Q4" against a weighted pool of other laborers. At the end of each quarter or year, this janitor is receiving a measurement of his labor as TITLED PROPERTY to anchor residuals from the market success of "Target #412 2025 Q1-Q4" across from his contribution, which may end up at 0.05%, depending on how Target organizes that store's yearly Impact Puzzle. Even so, that janitor now owns his LABOR as PROPERTY because of the PRECEDENT of the IMPACT PUZZLE.
He's depositing time, liability, and expertise, measured at 0.05% of the overall result, into the build of "Target #412 2025 Q1-Q4." This is to be measured and anchored to him as his property with a net profit residual. He'll also get paid his normal wages.
A customer buying a piece of "Target #412 2025 Q1-Q4" might DEVELOP that PROPERTY into their own contribution of time and expertise by designing some merch, content, or other exclusive output the story will use in some way. That "use of" is the store, immutably licensing the results developed by the customer within strict co-publishing / co-production terms, enforced by the store and the community of developers.
If anything, I can see your protocol being of service to that end because it makes these assignments a little easier, but again... this already exists and is easy to facilitate.
You're not facilitating "application" builds out of "licenses." You've used intellectual property that already exists, so you're building "impact puzzles" out of "digital titles" or "puzzle pieces" or "community garden plots."
All of this is open-source and free to use with attribution, which means credit. I'm enforcing this the polite way right now. Nobody has to buy a LICENSE. LOOOOL.
GOTTEM.
Your licensing bit is still interesting, but I think you have more questions than answers, and zero experience to answer them with. You're discrediting and devaluing existing precedent that's already been notarized for years while offering to enforce credit and value in public builds... without a public build.
Atomic unit of ingenuity. I bet you thought that was such a bar.