LegalTech-NFTs: Tokenizing Intellectual Property Rights for Transparent Legal Ownership

Abstract

Regardless of every traditional IP management system'slimitations like inefficiency, high legal costs, and disputes on ownership, IP rights serve to ensure protection of creative works and patents, as well as trademarks. Centralized registries are subject to manipulation, loss, and jurisdictional conflicts, and as there can be no enforcement of IP rights across borders, it is difficult to enforce them. Besides that, licensing and royalty distribution will often involve intermediaries which would create delays as well as losses of revenue from the creators.

Specifically, the Berne Convention, Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) regulations are some of the IP laws that guide firms with copyright, trademark, and patent protection. But few laws can handle digital asset ownership, cross border enforcement, and the present decentralization. To authenticate digital ownership transparently, courts and legal systems do not have the technical infrastructure.

To facilitate addressing these issues, this paper proposes LegalTech-NFTs itself, that is, a blockchain-based framework for tokenizing IP rights as non-fungible tokens (NFTs). This encourages smart contracts for licensing, royalty payments, and inclusion of public records to make all records tamper-proof, legally enforceable. Moreover, AI-driven infringement monitoring as well as on-chain arbitration for proactive legal enforcement also come built-in. The decentralized version of IP protection, as well as cross-border publicity, and the removal of intermediaries, has radically changed the way digital ownership is defined and legally protected.