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Story Protocol secures $80m to combat AI-driven IP theft The Block Story Protocol secures $80m to combat AI-driven IP theft The Block

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Story Protocol secures $80m to combat AI-driven IP theft The Block – Crypto News

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10 months ago

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Story Protocol, a San Francisco-based blockchain startup, has raised $80 million in a Series B funding round, bringing its valuation to $2.25 billion in just two years. The investment, led by Andreessen Horowitz with support from cryptocurrency investor Polychain Capital and others, comes as AI poses unprecedented risks to intellectual property (IP) protection.

Founded in 2022, Story Protocol has since raised a total of $140 million, according to the company. This new investment round demonstrates the possibility for blockchain technology to address growing concern over IP rights in the age of AI.

Other investors in the most recent round included Stability AI Ltd. Vice President Scott Trowbridge, K11 Founder Adrian Cheng, digital art collector Cozomo de’ Medici, Hashed, and Brevan Howard, a European hedge fund founded by British billionaire Alan Howard.

Given that Story was co-founded by Seung Yoon Lee, a South Korean company developer, the current round included Korean investors such as Samsung Next, Samsung Electronics Co.’s overseas investment arm, and Bang Si-hyuk, founder of HYBE Co., the label behind boy band sensation BTS.

How is the Story helping people to shield their IP from AI piracy?

Given that the rise of generative AI is exacerbating the issues of IP protection, Story Protocol’s blockchain network seeks to revolutionise IP management by allowing content creators to safely store their intellectual property on the platform. The solution embeds usage terms, such as licensing fees, in smart contracts, guaranteeing that intellectual property owners are adequately compensated when their work is exploited.

This is considering how generative AI models can generate new content by consuming massive volumes of existing data, including copyrighted information, without the original creators’ permission. In short, the Story Protocol method creates a decentralised IP registry by leveraging blockchain technology’s inherent transparency and immutability, allowing creators to declare sovereignty over their IPs through tokenization. 

“Without great original IP, the AI models don’t develop,” SY Lee, co-founder and chief executive of PIP Labs, said in a media interview, according to The Korea Economic Daily Global Edition. “AI is taking, stealing data without consent and benefiting from it without sharing the rewards with the original creators.”

Existing legal cases

The funding announcement coincides with a flurry of legal and ethical debates over AI and copyright issues.  Just one day before the Story Protocol announcement, OpenAI announced a partnership with Condé Nast to display content from its many publications. This decision comes as AI companies face mounting criticism from the media companies whose content they use to train their models.

In fact, just last year, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft on copyright issues with the newspaper’s intellectual property. Another more recent legal dispute pitted generative AI firm Anthropic against three authors who filed a class-action complaint in a California federal court, accusing the former of improperly utilising their copyrighted works to train its AI-powered chatbot, Claude.

According to the complaint, Anthropic developed its AI models without sufficient authorisation or pay, using pirated editions of works by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, among hundreds of thousands more. Nonetheless, these legal battles highlight the complex environment that Story Protocol aims to navigate and simplify.

The potential significance of Story Protocol’s technology goes beyond simply safeguarding individual creators. As Zaya Zyana notes in her Medium post, “Story Protocol’s blockchain network creates a secure and auditable trail of IP transactions, reducing the likelihood of disputes and legal challenges.”

Story Protocol, by providing a clear and efficient framework for managing intellectual property rights, has the potential to build a more equal environment for authors and users.

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