Exploring Story Protocol: AI, Intellectual Property, and the Future of Creative Rights

AI, Intellectual Property, and the Rise of Story Protocol

In a thought-provoking op-ed published in July 2023, actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt made a compelling argument: if artificial intelligence leverages your creative work, it should compensate you for it. This principle underpins the emerging blockchain initiative known as Story Protocol, which focuses on intellectual property rights. The concept is rapidly gaining traction and attracting significant investment, as evidenced by the recent news that PIP Labs, the primary contributor behind Story, has successfully secured an impressive $80 million Series B funding round, led by the well-known venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

AI companies have been aggressively collecting substantial amounts of creative content from the internet to train their large language models (LLMs). This has sparked a wave of legal disputes between content creators and major tech firms like OpenAI. For instance, the New York Times is currently engaged in a legal battle with OpenAI over allegations of copyright infringement. Similarly, content creators on platforms like YouTube are challenging Nvidia (NVDA), claiming that the company has improperly profited by developing a video model that utilizes scraped content from their work. In a contrasting move, News Corp, the parent company of the Wall Street Journal, has entered into a licensing agreement with OpenAI, allowing the use of its content for LLM training in a deal exceeding $250 million.

According to SY Lee, co-founder and CEO of PIP Labs, “Without great original IP, the AI models don’t evolve or improve.” In a recent interview, he emphasized that AI technologies are essentially “taking and utilizing your data without your consent,” benefiting from the hard work of original creators without offering them any share of the rewards.

Story Protocol aims to address these challenges by transforming intellectual property into what they call “IP Legos”—modular and programmable assets that can be managed, licensed, and monetized through smart contracts on a blockchain. Lee elaborated, stating that Story empowers creators to take control of their data by embedding licensing and royalty terms directly into their intellectual property. “With Story, creators can embed licensing terms directly into their IP, ensuring that anyone who utilizes it must comply with their established rules,” he explained. “This represents a declaration of sovereignty over your data. It’s about asserting, ‘Don’t mess with my data. This is my intellectual property.’”

The discussion surrounding what AI companies owe to creative individuals is critical for the entertainment sector, according to Lee. He noted, “In the past, Google drove some traffic to your content, but that still led to the demise of many local newspapers. The current landscape of AI threatens to obliterate the incentives for all of us to create original intellectual property.”

This initiative represents a significant use case for blockchain technology, moving beyond the typical decentralized finance (DeFi) projects that often recycle the same user base and liquidity with minimal technical advancements. “It’s all just infrastructure masturbation—another minor tweak, another DeFi chain, another DeFi app,” Lee commented. “Everyone is pursuing the same goal, chasing after obscure technical improvements.”

The mainnet launch of Story Protocol is anticipated later this year, with additional details set to be unveiled during the Korea Blockchain Week in Seoul this September.