Time-stamping intellectual property of startups on the blockchain using NFTs
Busyman is a startup platform connecting ideas with angel investors established in Prague in 2010. It has facilitated investments of over 10 mil EUR into over a hundred early stage startups from central Europe. Idea makers, innovators, businessmen or people with progressive ideas come to Busyman looking for smart money angels, who are willing to share their life business experiences and help to grow these brave ideas. Money is only part of the added value angels bring to the table, their know-how and contacts is what matters more to founders. Busyman has a database of over 1000 European angels and it is aggregating a professional club of angel investors who are ready to invest into well-prepared pre-seed and seed ideas. The protection of intellectual property of these startups should not be underestimated, since the majority of these early stage businesses only have their breakthrough ideas to share with the world.
The philosophy behind timestamps on the blockchain
We have observed that in many specific cases, it is very challenging to protect ideas, especially from next generation economies such as information technology, machine learning, virtual reality, blockchain technology and other non-tangible asset sectors. Patent offices do not offer this protection and if they do, the process of applying is slow and not very flexible. Also, once the patent application is approved in a country specific patent office, for instance in the Czech Republic, all the details of the patents become available online to the world and basically anybody can copy the know-how, unless the patent application is submitted in most countries in the rest of the world, which is almost impossible and extremely expensive for early stage startups. Nobody in the startup industry wants to spend their energy on administration tasks, their efforts need to be directed towards scaling their ideas and becoming a business generating income.
We are of the opinion that timestamping of specific know-how and intellectual property on the blockchain could be an alternative to this old and ineffective system that is currently in place.
How would NFT timestamps on the blockchain work?
Busyman currently aims to use the public blockchain of Crown Platform (CRW) to the purpose of protecting start-up ideas through the soon to be launched NFT (non-fungible tokens framework), which enables the registration of basically any forms of digital and physical assets on the Crown blockchain. The main reason behind this is to protect individuals with high-quality business ideas from having their ideas plagiarised by third parties. The problem needs solving with a long-term capability of enabling individuals to capitalize on their business ideas and creativity and bring a certain degree of automation to the idea protection space.
To solve this complex problem, Busyman is currently working with the following three parameters:
1) Positive protection: The protection of ideas against plagiarism by third parties is complicated, because patent right is a question of national sovereignty, hence depending on the laws and regulations of a given country. Thus, instead of protecting ideas against plagiarism, Busyman aims to build an open environment which will help to protect ideas for their development. That means protecting investment ideas from third parties by getting them on the road as quick as possible and pushing them toward rollout as soon and stable as possible.
2) Templatization: To solve the problem of comparability between different ideas (i.e. in order to judge whether an idea has already existed or not), a certain degree of templatization is needed. That means to break down business ideas to certain parameters. These parameters include but are not limited to a) business parameters, b) technical parameters, c) feasibility and scale parameters.
3) Community drive: An aspect of protection of ideas is the degree of acceptance of a given rule. That is, law is powerful because it is obeyed and commonly shared by a society’s participants intersubjective world. A strong community drive in the setup of the protection process gives it further legitimacy. If the community can contribute to the process, it is more likely to be taken as a reference for the novelty of ideas.
But how would the flow of the idea work in the real world? In order to push ideas toward their realization, we have devised the following procedure as a mechanism of submission and elaboration of ideas, protected through blockchain and allowing for quick collaboration in the given contexts.
Ideas basically become code to which contributors from all sorts of backgrounds add respective value and get part of the idea value back depending on their contribution. Similarly as we can see in many blockchain projects such as Crown. Yes this is a vision how the idea economy will work in the future, but NFTs enable us to start now by locking the initial “idea value”, assign a concrete ownership and place it on the blockchain.
Will this approach work?
Naturally the protection of ideas on the blockchain will initially never be as strong as the one provided by patent offices. The main point in supporting this case is the fact that founders will have the option to open their know how to the world (similarly as Elon Musk did with his Tesla patents) while securely claiming ownership. This should attract more talent and capital in case the idea is a breakthrough. Those founders who will not be interested to open up their know-how should have an option to keep it secret, that is perfectly fine. Both models — opened and closed should be able to co-exists next to each other. In the closed model case, if anybody misuses the idea, and for example in 5 years from the time a NFT was created, the know-how is used by someone else, the creator can prove to the world that he was the one who initially came up with that specific idea.
The world today is driven by social networks and communities (including the raising blockchain communities) as we have mentioned earlier in our text. These powerful forces can easily help idea makers to point their fingers towards those who are using ideas without proper rights. We believe that internet societies powered by blockchain might act as the force of good behaviour not only inside the network, but in the real world as well.
Next steps
Busyman will most likely license the NFT tool, which was developed by a long term Crown community contributor “defunctec”. Once the Crown Platform tech lead Artem Brazhnikov finishes the work on the NFT framework and the release into mainnet happens towards the end of September 2019, the Busyman NFT timestamping service should come online soon afterwards.
Initially, it will enable startups to register their intellectual property such as company names, logos, specific know-how as a Non-Fungible Token on the Crown blockchain. At a later stage and depending on the development of the NFT framework running on the Crown Platform, there will be other interesting features such as trading of these registered assets creating a market of breakthrough ideas and intellectual property.
