Bibliographic review explores blockchains and smart contracts for managing intellectual property rights, suggesting improvements in contract enforcement and ownership tracking.
This article presents a bibliographic review about different solutions and analyses due to the use of blockchains and/or smart contracts to the management of some aspects regarding intellectual property assets, such as the proper register to proof of existence, tracking of ownership, copy control, payment automatization, enforcement of contracts etc. The analyses have been made considering these technologies when applied to copyright, industrial property, sui generis protection and technology transfer contracts. The methodology consists of the search for keywords on scientific bases, with further qualitative analysis about the content for extracting the most important points on each document. In general, one can observe that most of the proposed applications refers to the aspects regarding copyright, followed by applications for patents, whereas in most solutions, the registration on blockchains is limited on information about the asset, without necessarily including it on the blockchain.
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Schüler et al. (2025) studied this question.
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