Reaching the Future Faster: How Blockchain Can Revolutionize the Way We Approach IP Law
IP Law exists to incentivize creation and accomplishes this by artificially restricting the distribution of a creation so that the creator can charge for that creation.¹ Like any tangible product of labor, IP Law insists that the creator of a work should be considered its owner, so that the creator may derive economic value from it. Furthermore, if the law could not sufficiently protect a creator from infringement, then society will suffer from the lack of creators willing to create anything.
The Free Software Foundation created a “General Public License”(GPL) with the goal of protecting the rights of software creators by (1) copyrighting the software; and (2) offering a license that gives legal permission to copy, distribute, and/or modify the software.² Since the GPL, there have been numerous other licenses created to achieve similar goals.³
The primary purpose of the GPL is to protect the freedom to share and modify free software. For the hacker who merely exists to create new things, the freedom to create those things would indeed be what matters most. But, humans are more complex than that. There exists a wide variety of extrinsic motivators, all of which could factor into a person’s desire to create or modify software. But, even as new projects continue to flow into the Internet, there can still never be a guarantee that any of those projects will ever get finished, or will ever be found and improved upon by someone else. While it can certainly be said that the open-source community can tout a great number of successes, it cannot be ignored that every success stands on a graveyard of failures.
Blockchain has the potential to replace licenses in providing a much more effective way for programmers to exercise greater control over their work. By storing software on a blockchain, the owner can control the number of “calls” made to it by any one account, much like Infura does with its blockchain set up to provide a test environment for development up to a certain number of calls before it’s no longer free.
There are benefits to everyone in treating open-source software in this manner. If you are a developer, nothing stops you from cloning a git repository and making your own changes (if the owner chooses to keep it free). But a nice middle ground would be a scenario where the owner wishes to keep the software free up to a certain point, and then charge for it. I believe this was likely only an option for commercial software, which would at best provide only a free trial period before charging. Blockchain permits even very small developers to reap the benefits of their work in a way that was previously infeasible.
- Mark Lemley, IP In a World Without Scarcity, 90 New York University Law Review 460, 462 (2015).
- GNU General Public License Version 3, www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html (“[I]f you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must pass on to the recipients the same freedoms that you received. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights.”)
- Open Source Licenses by Category, https://opensource.org/licenses/category (last visited May 12, 2021).
