Join the Revolution in Fighting Idea Theft

Protecting ideas is a cryptic concept — but an important one when it comes to intellectual property and product development. Without a doubt, protecting what is yours has only become harder since the advent of the Internet.

It is in this borderless, digital world where patents become difficult to enforce — and it is in this same world where a borderless, digital solution is required to protect what is rightfully yours.

Typical legal contracts come in PDF or paper form. This means they have to be intensively managed and enforced across borders. Further, they can simply cost a lot of time and money to authenticate.

For example, Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) is used in the United States to obtain digital case and docket information from federal appellate, district, and bankruptcy courts. This service costs $0.10 USD per page. While that might not sound like a lot, multiply this figure by the millions and millions of document requests which flow through the American judicial system and it quickly adds up.

According to the Administrative Office, the electronic public access fees generated $144.6 million USD in revenue for one fiscal year. Clearly, there needs to be a better way to both generate and distribute proof of idea authentication.

This is where blockchain and its intrinsic time-stamp technology comes in. Blockchain technology, in this context, guarantees any document stays permanently protected. The process only takes a few minutes but authenticates information which can then never be altered.

It is this idea of digitally confirming records that is strengthened by the infallibility of blockchain. In fact, different global jurisdictions appear to be warming up to the idea of moving from analog to digital documentation. For example, the first birth certificates to be recorded by exclusively using blockchain technology were issued in Brazil this September.

Further, China’s Supreme Court ruled last year that evidence authenticated with blockchain technology is binding in legal disputes. The Supreme Court declared that “Internet courts shall recognize digital data that are submitted as evidence if relevant parties collected and stored these data via blockchain with digital signatures, reliable timestamps and hash value verification or via a digital deposition platform, and can prove the authenticity of such technology used.”

An Internet Court in Hangzhou, Eastern China, turned to blockchain on the back of this ruling to fight piracy at the expense of online writers. Wang Jiangqiao, a judge at the Internet Court, said that since “blockchain guarantees that data can not be tampered […] all digital footprints stored in the judicial blockchain system […] have legal effect.”

Respecting intellectual property is vital to startup and product success stories. Our new product, Digital Proof, helps to give confidence back to the creators so that they can be sure that their ideas are safe from theft.

It remains to be seen how far the digital authentication of documents will go — from birth certificates to property deeds and art ownership — but the concept holds true over any dispute of ownership. Forget long lines at the notary, blockchain may have just solved such court battles for years to come.