Story Protocol wants to make intellectual property programmable

The US-based start-up PIP Labs, which has already raised over $130 million, has developed a blockchain protocol for “tokenizing” the management of all forms of intellectual property.

In the age of generative AI, social networks and UGC platforms of all kinds, managing the intellectual property of a creation, regardless of its format (text, image, audio), as well as authorising and monetising its many uses, is becoming increasingly complex.

The rights holders of a commercial piece of music may refuse to allow its inclusion in databases of recordings used to train generative AIs, or they may authorise it under certain conditions, while allowing its remixing, its synchronisation with UGC videos on YouTube or memes on Tiktok, or the extraction of its stems to create mashups, provided that appropriate monetisation conditions are met.

This issue of increasingly complex IP management is one that PIP Labs (Programmable Intellectual Property Labs) is trying to address. The company has developed its own Level 1 blockchain, The Story Network (Story), which allows IPs (including music, text, photos, graphic creations...) to be registered as NFTs (non-fungible tokens).

This is nothing new, as other blockchains, such as Story, also facilitate the decentralised registration of property rights. However, Story's protocol introduces an additional layer of programming for tokenised IP assets, in the same way that Ethereum's protocol allows the programming of NFT management through smart contracts that are executed automatically.

This will facilitate the provision of an API, or programming interface, to each registered intellectual property asset on the Story blockchain. These APIs will enable application developers to interact with the asset through the use of license modules. The Story protocol offers the ability to track the provenance of assets, facilitate direct licensing on chain, and automate revenue sharing management. It’s compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and can be used in conjunction with other blockchain ecosystems.

When a derivative work is registered with Story (for example, an AI's adaptation of a song in a different style), the original IP is duly credited in the new NFT. The creator or assignee of the original intellectual property is then automatically entitled to a systematic share of the revenue generated by the derivative work, in accordance with the terms of the associated licence.

"Our goal is to put all intellectual property, all media and all culture on a blockchain. Furthermore, we want to give creators who register their intellectual property at the programmable level of the Story Protocol the ability to define how it can be licensed, remixed, and monetised by third parties," says Seung Yoon Lee, co-founder and CEO of PIP Labs, on the Story Protocol YouTube channel.

In 2016, Seung Yoon Lee, a young South Korean entrepreneur, founded Radish Fiction, a mobile reading platform based in the United States that offers serialised novels and audiobooks in various genres (romance, fantasy, suspense, mystery, etc.), which he sold in 2021 to Kakao Entertainment, the entertainment division of Korean internet giant Kakao, for $440 million.

Another co-founder of PIP Labs is Jason Zhao, an alumnus of the crypto exchange Coinbase and DeepMind, a Google subsidiary specialising in artificial intelligence research. The company recently closed an $80 million Series B financing round led by the Californian investment fund Andreessen Horowitz, bringing the total raised since its founding to $134 million at a valuation of $2.25 billion.