Democratize IP: Story Protocol's $54M Funding Round

Story Protocol recently completed a $54 million funding round, led by venture capital fund a16z.  Story Protocol is developing an open platform that "aims to democratize IP creation through a global and extensible IP repository."  While "democratizing IP" sounds like a lofty goal, Story Protocol's value proposition is intuitively simple.

The internet is filled with intellectual property. Creators post content on social media. Developers share open source code. Writers publish their thoughts on blogs. Plagiarism and copying has always been a problem on the internet, but generative AI has added a new wrinkle. Generative AI platforms like OpenAI's ChapGPT and Google's Bard train on data from the internet. In other words, generative AI learns from other's intellectual property. Since generative AI learns from IP found on the internet, there's a chance that generative AI models could infringe someone else's intellectual property.  

Ask ChatGPT yourself. ChatGPT will tell you that it doesn't include any inherent mechanisms to avoid IP infringement. ChatGPT even recommends double-checking its work to ensure that generated content is original and doesn't infringe on copyrighted material.

As generative AI becomes increasingly common, the risk of accidentally infringing another's IP increases. Story Protocol is attempting to offer a solution. Story Protocol's IP infrastructure will supposedly track IP ownership and allow creators and users to license their IP rights.  

While their value proposition is simple, Story Protocol is undertaking an ambitious task.  Even if investors believe in their mission, Story Protocol will still have to earn the trust of IP authors and creators to be successful.