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

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

3. The Story of Bitcoin
Started in 2008 with a White Paper published by Satoshi Nakamoto.

4. The Story of Bitcoin No Fraudulent Record Tampering
Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash with no Third Party Intermediaries
No Fraudulent Record Tampering

5. The Story of Bitcoin No Fraudulent Double Spending
Verifying Transactions
Mining Blocks in the Blockchain
No Fraudulent Double Spending

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

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

8. The Story of Ethereum Allows developing smart contracts

9. Some Definitions
Smart Contracts
Tokens
ICOs

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

11. 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

12. Intellectual Property
IP Law andBlockchain
Patents
Trademarks
Copyrights
Proprietary
Intellectual Property

13. 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

14. Patents

15. Patents

16. 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

17. How IP Law Impacts Blockchain
Patents
Trademarks
Copyrights
Proprietary
Intellectual Property

18. 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.

19. 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.

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

21. 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.

22. 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.

23. 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

24. Discussion