The history of ownership is the history of society itself. Humans build worlds then battle over who gets what part of it. It’s the nature of the beast. The same is true for the digital world. The collective public good of the internet is the filter for art, stories, code, memes and much, much more. Our creative culture and technological advances paraded on full display, with everyone in attendance. 

Who owned what in the digital thus became a problem fast. The music industry sued Napster before many of those alive today even downloaded Spotify. Duplication of code is as easy as Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V. The free software movement advocated a permanently open shared endeavor, and enterprises shut it down. The internet we live in today is a permanently surveilled and tolled place, with every click recorded and checked for fees - including access to culture. Services dominate art, monetizing their efforts handsomely with creators struggling for sovereignty and a paycheck, and at the whim of the platform, who are themselves in thrall to the servers they built it on. Moreover, the rise of AI means access to creator IP has become more valuable than ever, with the need for verifiable, specialized, rights-cleared real world data.

How Web3 Tried to Help (and Where It Fails)

Up steps Web3, ready to help in full earnestness - and sadly falling short. Onchain IP certainly sounds like it could finally put creators in control. It does feel like it could help earmark data successfully to help train AI but not at the expense of user rights and creator intent - and thus build better data sets for AI to learn on. If code was law, then yes creators could begin building their IP with their community, and successfully (and trustlessly) enfranchise them within their shared world. Protocols like Story try to map Bitcoin’s narrative to intellectual property rights management, arguing that programmability in rights management could avoid the data overhead and legal tax extracted by intermediaries, and could be a foundation from which new law is built.

Except it doesn’t. It’s just another rent-seeking loop. It’s just a parallel system alongside the current one that you have to pay extra for that ultimately will get tested in court in any case. Delphi Digital asks whether there really is a benefit to an additional extractive protocol. This isn’t to call out Story as a bad endeavor - quite the opposite. The protocol is a well-meaning intent to try and capture and democratise IP access rights and help creators and investors earn more, but it fails to enshrine the most important thing - the sanctity of the data itself and the intellectual property it protects or which it itself is.

If OpenAI used data you own which you had protected through ownership of an NFT on the blockchain - then you better have a good lawyer and deep pockets to win that case. Especially if the onchain IP project hosted files or metadata to your ownership on AWS or IPFS gateways, the discussion over ownership becomes murkier still. If the data isn’t sovereign, the ownership claim is fragile. There is vast potential for blockchain and its auditing to be used to validate ownership, but these are not ratified by law. There isn’t anything fundamentally wrong with setting up something akin to a medieval feudal charter for the set of rights protected by your protocol, but ultimately what is being sold to investors is the promise these rights might mean something - but you need to pay rent until they are tested for the privilege. Tokenization of IPs, without the proper infra, just risks adding a new layer of intermediaries. Things like token slashing and governance votes feel like they offer protection through shared economic incentive, but they have the potential to mislead creators into thinking they’ve secured rights or that they truly own the data they have a certificate of ownership for. They might sound like enforcement, but they are merely experiments in community coordination - and expensive ones at that.

How to Truly Own IP

To truly own IP, you need to control the data layer itself. To manage digital IP at the grand scale and with granular control, you need data management that provides and restricts access at the field level of the content itself. Not just a token that's a receipt for a permissioned key that access to everything in the file or nothing. Most Web3 IP setups today are hopelessly coarse-grained. Source’s access control is fine-grained. The user gets to decide what is accessible and what isn’t. Say a fantasy writer selling a character in a manuscript, or a scientific dataset only allowing access to one patient group in the data, or an AI company only accessing rights-cleared data. All creative works - datasets, songs, movies - can carry proofs of their own provenance and consent, and only operate when that consent is given from the owner - not having recourse to an external registry or platform - including a Web3 platform like Story - to vouch for it. 

It’s about verifiability at the data level. Digital objects can be inscribed with permanent watermarks that prove its creators, its owner, and the hands it has passed through and - this is the important bit - use those watermarks to also allow functionality of the environment itself. The data isn’t just tagged with who owns it, the data itself will only respond to queries from those with approved keys. Instead of the platform arbitrating what you can use, the data itself enforces the boundary. Every change, remix or fork in the data can be traced and rewound without needing to trust it has been tampered with. If the rules are within the asset itself, then creators always know where their IP is, how it's being used, and how they can benefit from it. For users, it’s an NFT that can work as a key, not just a receipt. Where the computation of its turning in the lock is done at the edge, not decided by a centralized validator.

On the grand scale, this is how we create a digital world owned by communities. This is how Web3 can make good on its promise of democratic ownership of internet utilities that are trustless, sovereign, disintermediated, decentralized and verifiable. This is how onchain IP can really mean something, where creators can have control, portability and fair participation. Tokenized IP is a great start, but sovereign data is the goal. If we can marry blockchain-efficient financialization on top of data that belongs to people - then we can all feel empowered by our culture, and be free to share it with the world.