When you build a house, it’s yours - your real property. Similarly, when you create a software application or a fictional character, it’s your intellectual property (IP). And whether you’re a developer, author, musician, researcher, chemist, designer, architect or basically any kind of human being, you should care about intellectual property - a great deal.

Intellectual property like copyright grants creators exclusive rights to their works, allowing them to benefit from their innovations by preventing others from using or selling their IP without permission. IP powers the creator economy.

Intellectual property, however, is not only Hollywood movies and billboard charts: IP means AI models, memes, game assets, character traits, and so much more. Pepe is IP. Beyonce's voice and likeness are IP. A blueprint for a new invention is IP. Mickey Mouse is IP. A Fortnite skin is IP. Once you start looking, you'll find intellectual property everywhere - no wonder it is considered the world’s biggest asset class worth multiple trillion dollars.

Intellectual property, the world's biggest asset class, is everywhere. But here's the catch: It's illiquid and trapped behind closed platforms.

Due to the intangible nature of intellectual property, the process of capturing ownership and defining usage rights has always been tedious. For hundreds of years, lawyers around the world have created millions of pages of legalese, defining what their client’s originality is and how others may or may not use it.

This work-intensive - and thus costly - process has not only lead to an unfair system where only the top 1% of creators can afford to properly set up licensing agreements for their work; it has also left IP locked up in an illiquid and opaque legacy system, while more and more other assets move to the digital sphere.

And there's another major issue: the sheer speed and superabundance of AI-generated media is outpacing the current IP system that was designed for physical replication. In many cases, LLMs are trained on copyrighted data, but proving that is hard. In the worst case, creators are degraded to mere datasets, hindering the sustainable reproduction of original content: A classic tragedy of the commons situation.

Story frees intellectual property from its current constraints by onramping it to the blockchain and making it programmable, sovereign and liquid. Creators can onramp any creative asset onto Story, turning it into programmable IP legos that anyone can monetize across mediums and apps, transforming the internet into an IP legoland.

Story achieves this by building a vertically integrated technical solution from the ground up, dedicated to tokenized IP. Story Network, the world's IP blockchain, is the decentralized infrastructure foundation optimized for handling complex IP data structures quickly and cost-efficiently. It has a modular Proof-of-Creativity Protocol natively enshrined that unlocks IP functionalities like permissionless licensing and automated royalty payments. And to interlock code and law, Story uses the Programmable IP License, a custom-designed universal license agreement with out-of-the-box configurations.

The combination of dedicated infrastructure, smart contract protocol and legal solution provides a strong foundation for an IP-centered application ecosystem, tackling use cases like IPFi, remixing, and much more. With tokenizing IP, Story ushers in a future of IPs as RWAs, unleashing liquidity and composability into a multi-trillion-dollar asset class.

Want to dive in deeper? Read Stanford Blockchain Review's article on Story's architecture.