Blockchain 3.0 (VIII): Principles of Blockchain Notarization and Intellectual Property (IP) Protection

With the rapid development of the virtual economy, intellectual property (IP) infringement disputes in film, television, games, creativity, etc. frequently occur, and the market urgently needs effective IP protection solutions. Traditional methods have many problems, and blockchain technology has brought about subversive innovation in IP protection, completely solving the IP protection problem.

Blockchain IP protection relies on hashing and timestamping on the blockchain.

What are hashes and timestamps?

The so-called hash is an algorithm that runs on files of any content (it can be documents, pictures, audio, video, or even genomic files containing massive amounts of data). The result of the operation will generate a string based on the content, and this string cannot be reversed to infer the original content.

The timestamp is the time when the hash is written to the blockchain.

Principles of blockchain notarization and IP protection

Now that we know about hashing and timestamps, let's look at an example: a movie company generates a 64-bit string through hashing of a movie that is about to be released. This string can represent the unique private identifier of the file, which completely represents the content of the movie. Then the string is placed in the text of the blockchain transaction. A timestamp will be generated at the moment of the transaction, and the hash + timestamp becomes the proof of the transaction. In the future, if the content needs to be reconfirmed, the same hash algorithm can be used to operate on the movie. As long as the content remains unchanged, the operation result string will not change at all, thus proving ownership.

As a permanent, public, and tamper-proof global distributed database, once a transaction is written into the blockchain, it will be stored in the database forever. This feature is a perfect solution for notarization and IP protection, and may also become an important function for the operation of the entire society in the future.

At present, relevant solutions have emerged at home and abroad, such as Proof of Existence, Factom, Monegraph, Ancun, etc. We will introduce them in detail in the following articles.