Programmable IP: Ushering in the Onchain Renaissance | Jason Zhao - Story Protocol

[Music] all right hello everyone I'm Jason I'm the co-founder of story protocol and today I want to share with you a little bit about the programmable IP layer that we're building and how you can get involved with programmable IP but before I talk about story protocol I want to share more about the current situation that we're seeing in the content world so theoretically we should be living in a Renaissance of onchain contents with the Avent of generative AI in the internet things should be going really well for example social media supercharging remixing you're seeing billions and billions of billions and billions of remixes on Tik Tok on YouTube on Instagram and this is a behavior that gives everyone global distribution straight from their living room and as we all have seen generative AI is supercharging this Reality by turning not just everyone into a creater that has access to global distribution but also allowing everyone to create with the full power of a Hollywood studio from your living room and this is uh from open ai's newest video model you can tell it's extremely high fidelity so what we have is this exponentially growing abundance of high quality content on the internet it took AI only a year and a half to get to the amount of images produced that it took photography 150 years and of course if we go back to drawing that's going to take 1,500 years so we're really seeing this exponential curve high quality content that anyone can create however there really is no golden age uh you saw Hollywood had strikes for both writers and actors that lasted 6 months in the past year and creators online are struggling to make a living by creating what and doing what they love uh and the reason why is is not because of the speed or performance of these internet networks or even of generative AI the real gating problem that we're seeing in content today has everything to do with IP attribution and monetization so we've seen lots of interesting experiments come out with generative AI there's things like Drake and the weekends which was a remix that was created by someone in the living room the actual Drake and the actual weekend had nothing to do with it it reached number one on Soundcloud in a day and on YouTube you're seeing Harry Potter remix with Balenciaga and these are getting tens of millions of views and of course JK rling was not behind this so this is really interesting but it's also a lose-lose situation we're seeing the people who created these interesting remixes aren't able to actually generate or monetize off of these creations because they're violating on copyright and of course JK rling doesn't win anything either so both the remixer and the original Creator are losing out and you're seeing this real tension come into play with the lawsuits you're seeing open AI getting sued by the New York Times because open AI is regurgitating the content behind the pay wall um and there's many many issues with gy images where the AI is actually reproducing their Watermark so this is really a new Napster moment because we have have this brand new technology of generative AI That's supercharged by the global distribution of the internet and we have no way to ensure that creators have their IP protected and no way to ensure that people can actually remix this safely and actually monetize off the back of their creativity so what this is really leading to is I think a tragedy of the commons with ai ai can continue getting better and better and training on more and more data but at some point if the people creating the data the people creating the artwork the music whatever it is they don't get compensated there's no incentive for anyone to create uh even Google would point at least Point people to web pages and those web pages could monetize off that traffic now if you have open AI or any other llm summarizing that information from the web pages there's no traffic to those web pages in in years they'll be they'll die out because there's no way for them to monetize so this is a real tragedy common situation that we're seeing where we don't have a good compensation model for AI and and this is only going to get worse as more and more people learn how to use these tools and as they grow ever more powerful so to address this challenge we feel like the internet needs a brand new IP infrastructure just like copyright laws were first invented after the Advent of the Gutenberg Press which made replication extremely cheap now we have to deal with a new challenge AI is not just copying work it's not replicating it's actually generating entirely new content so the idea of copyright is outdated and we think that we need an internet native programmable IP layer so what story protocol is trying to do is to build this IP layer and to allow onchain IPS uh have programmable rights that their creators set that set the Rules of Engagement autonomously and that can be written upon and read by AIS and other programs so what does this actually mean what does this look like at a high level I think the best way to describe this is to first talk about defi because this is something that we're all familiar with so the first wave of crypto was really focused on building an independent monetary system and introducing this idea of programmable money with programmable money you can take this dollar bill this static piece of paper in your wallet and actually move it on chain and tokenize it and even though it may have the same dollar value you may be able to buy the same amount of items with it a usdc token or usdt token can actually plug in an entire decentralized ecosystem of apps and this this value can flow across these different programs permissionless you can swap it on Unis swap you can lend it on compounds and no one has to orchestrate all of this this is all due to the power of making money programmable so we want to do the same thing for IP there's no reason why IP should stay locked up in the pen and paper world of the traditional legal system that's inaccessible to creators and inaccessible even to Studios uh so we want to take these trapped IPS from the offline world and make them programmable by registering them on chain now you might ask well don't NFS already do this well I think nfts are a great start they validate digital ownership and they serve as a source of Providence and attribution but at the end of the day nfts are still static pointers to media files so while they bring media and culture on chain they don't actually make it programmable for example if I own an isuki and my friend owns a puggy and I want to create a comic book with both of our IPS I have to go and read a complicated physical license and I have to read the license for the pudgy and then probably have my legal team talk to their legal team or my lawyer talk to their lawyer in order to make that happen and so there's still very much individual atoms and we want to unlock programmable IP where each nft actually has the ability to have royalties built in set the rights for engagement for who can remix and create works on that IP and also allow people to permissionless generate real legally binding licenses off of that work so we just to dive into what this actually means on a tech level uh We've created essentially a different structure where each programmable IP has both nouns and verbs the nouns are essentially the state of that IP what makes that IP the IP so that's the pointer to the media file that's important metadata and the way we implement this is through a token bound account so any existing nft can attach a story protocol token bound account to that nft that represents a portal into all of our modules which are the verbs so you can see this is sort of what we call an IP asset which are the nouns of the protocol it stores the core metadata with the asset and also the specific data related to the licensing and other modules and then once you have this IP asset registered on chain and again any nft can become one you have access to our entire world of modules that makes permissionless licensing permissionless remixing and royalty distribution possible with just a single click uh and the final part that ties us all together is that we're not trying to build an alternative legal system we've actually worked very carefully with lawyers to create something that we call the programmable IP license or the pill and think about this like the YC safe of story protocol so what we're doing is creating a very simple English really human readable license that anyone can understand with specific parameters like the upfront fee that someone needs to pay to use an IP the recurring Revenue what regions the IP is active in we've set all these terms in both the license and on story protocol call so what we have is a onetoone mapping between the legal rights and the onchain terms so we can actually create this link between the legal system and what's happening on chain and you can see that we've created very simple uis that any developer can plug into their app to make registration and setting these licensing terms and onchain rights extremely simple so the end vision is to build just like def5 built an entire parallel Financial ecosystem to build an entire parallel creative ecosystem where IP can transcend mediums transcend apps transcend platforms and grow and expands in a way that it tracks across different apps so you can have a Creator tool created an IP register on story protocol that can be shared on a different social media app and then if that character blows up it can actually become an AI model on a character AI Style app and this is all tracked on chain with story protocol and I'll actually show you a live demo of how this works so the end goal really is to create this web of ips and to create the idea of networked IPS by making them programmable so this is what story prot is trying to do and and to make this a little bit less abstract I want to go and do a live demo so uh bear with me I heard the Wi-Fi is not super good but fortune favors the bolds this what Matt Damon said famously two years ago in a brilliant crypto.com Super Bowl ad so let's try this out okay so I want to start the journey here this is an app called magma which is a web2 app with over a couple million users so no one here knows anything about crypto and we've actually abstracted away as you'll see a lot of the crypto uh sort of wallets and all the gas fees so anyone can use this and I'll show you how to register this on story protocol and what that means so this is a obviously pre-loaded image I'm not an artist I'm actually going to just ruin it a little by putting my own flare on it there you go so I I added to this image and now I'm ready to register this artwork on story protocol and you can see that I can give it a name I only have one hand right now so I'm just going to type a couple letters um let's call it hello and now you can set the onchain licensing terms so we've actually simplified this there's a lot more options but um there's a non-commercial option and a commercial option and you can actually see the details for what this means if you're confused so now we've set onchain rights and um I'm going to write a description and then register it on story protocol so now you can see it's registering on chain none of this involved any Crypton native UI we've completely abstracted that away from the user so this works for web 2 and for web 3 now most artwork is actually collaborative so what I'm actually going to do is log in as a different user using a different browser and modify it with generative AI so magma is kind of like a fig maile UI as you can tell so all of this is based on collaborating and multiple people creating an IP so this is a multiplayer game I'm going to try out their generative AI feature and I'm going to give a prompt to make this little fire guy a rainbow creature and so this is going to take some time but you can see that the generative AI is modifying this original image um and almost there all right cool so now it's all nice and rainbow I will now accept this change and again this is a different user than the first one so we're collaborating on this and I'm going to register this as well onto story protocol I can give it a name let's just call it hello to and I'm going to keep the same license as before which was a non-commercial license and I can actually edit the ownership shares so Jason was the first person and I'm may now so maybe may may feels like she deserves more shares and Jason gets less shares because AI is cool so now we've Chang the ownership structure and now we can register it again on chain and I'll show you what this actual IP asset that's been registered looks like it takes a while to load so before I actually go to the output of this magma registration I'm going to show you very quickly another use case which is hey so hay is a front end which is built on lens and soory protocol is actually created in open actions using the permissionless lens open actions uh that they released that allows any post on lens whether it's on hey or orb which is a mobile app that we've also integrated with or or really any other lens client to register any artwork or post as an IP asset on story protocol so let's actually go through that right now what's happening so I'm going to create a new post hello Denver and I'm going to attach an image because I want to show my artwork to the world I'm going to put this cool buffer corn image and before posting I'm going to click on this open actions button and what I'm going to do is register this as an intellectual property via story protocol as you can see it's extremely simple there is no complicated legal text here and I'm just going to name the post um type in myself as the author and actually I can select between these two preset flavors of licenses so let's say I want this to be commercialized and I want to actually earn money for this on lens so I'm going to save these settings and I'm going to post this on Hy so this is going to take maybe a few moments I'm going to refresh okay let's see all right there we go so that's loaded and you can see unlike a regular post there's actually a little copyright logo here that shows that this is intellectual property so anyone viewing this post can look at the terms set on story protocol and actually view it on our dashboard uh so that's how it works on hey now I'm going to go back to magma the licensing term should now be available on our dashboard so I'm going to click view on story protocol and you can see here that we built a custom dashboard almost like an ether for story protocol here you can see this crappy smiley face that I made as well as the AI generated rainbow creature and you can see the revenue split is 25% and 75% as we had set and you can even see that this is AI assisted so another use case story protocol is tracking what has and hasn't touched Ai and this is all registered on chain so uh oh and also at the bottom you can see the license that this has been attached with so why is this interesting this is interesting because once you've registered programmable IP from any single app on soy protocol it's now in a Universal IP database that any other app can pull from so while we haven't built it into this demo you can imagine that I take this rainbow fire creature that I've registered on magma someone else discovers it and they really love it and because this is a social remixing non-commercial license they can actually make a post with the fire creature on hey and maybe people love it on hey it blows up on the social media platform you can plug it into maybe even an AI chat bot so another another partner that we've integrated with is myell which is like a character AI style conversational Asian app you can imagine that that fire creature because it's stored on registered on story protocol actually gets licensed into a my shell AI character where you can actually talk to this fire creature and these models themselves the AI models themselves are registered on chain so if I click on this um I'm just pre-loaded it but you can see that this is actually a transaction uh where each of these individual models are themselves registered as AIS or as IPS on story protocol so like I said this is creating a network of ips that can transcend individual apps transcend mediums and transcend platforms now the last thing I want to show is to go back to the Explorer for magma and you can see here the source so I can actually go back to the original app where this IP was registered which is magma and I have a view only frame of my magma artwork let's say this is a third person right let's say one of you wants to remix this you can actually click the remix button and build your own Edition onto this IP creating this IP graph and creating a chain of derivatives that are all logged on story protocol so what does that actually look like well we've created yet another integration with foraster frames called artcast that allows anyone to take an AI image and add their own prompt and evolve the image in this kind of social AI remixing experiment so this is live on farcaster now I just picked out a cool example of a really long artcast chain that started off with a dog uh like a Sheba and then got remixed many many many many times by many different people and ended up in this cute little dog with hat so I just want to show you what this looks like we actually tracked the IP graph of all of these remixes so you can see here at the very bottom that we are currently on this green node that's the very tail end of a long chain of remixes but uh the blue the blue node is a root so that was the original image that led to all these remixes and you can see people have forked it at different points remix that IP all the way to create this complex IP graph that ended up in this cute little dog and so while this is just limited all that IP graph that you saw is just limited to ER in that one app the vision is much broader as I as I mentioned this can span across apps so imagine an IP graph that looks exactly like the one you saw where each node is an artwork or an IP registered from a different app and it's flowing across these platforms and across these apps in a complex ecosystem that's the real vision of what we're trying to do at story protocol and what we're building the programmable IP layer for um so just to go back to the slide deck so just takeaways because I know you guys are all Builders here uh just talking about our protocol design at a high level some technical takeaways from how we design our protocol the first is that we really wanted every nft project to be able to use story protocol and we know that there's already a lot of interesting IP on chain so we use token bound accounts such that any existing nft could get a token bound account a smart contract wallet attached to it and become a part of story protocol so really all registration means on story protocol is getting a special story protocol token bound account that act as a portal to all the functionality that I just talked about the second is that we have a modular architecture so uh just to go back a few slides this modular architecture means that all of our states uh and this is the change we're making now but all of our state is going to be stored in the nouns the core IP asset but then all of the functionality are in the stateless modules so what that allows us to do is we actually want third party developers people like you to build brand new modules on story protocol that can actually build new functionalities into IP and you can as a model Creator monetize your modules and actually earn revenue from building modules that people are using um the benefit of this is also that we have highly upgradeable modules because all this state is stored in the IP asset if you want to make changes to your module it's very easy you just add a new module and plug into the existing state on chain okay and then lastly the whole point of this vision is to make IP programmable so as I mentioned we've worked very carefully with the legal team lawyers to create a license that is one toone between offchain legal contract and onchain enforceable rights and so we wanted to make IP programmable um a difficulty that we've had in our protocol and you know this is completely open access anyone so if you are contributing we would love for you to be a part of this uh Access Control has been a little bit of a pain for us so if you you want to take a look at our code and help us out there we'd appreciate uh your feedback okay so just to conclude I only have a minute left I just wanted to share some of the ways that you can get involved the first is that here at e Denver we have a lot of different bounties for building either on top of the core protocol or integrating an existing app with story protocol or even building a brand new business on top of the programmable IP layer so please come reach out to us we're uh we're at table E5 right now so like right behind the speaker Booth uh we also have a grant system that's going to last beyond e Denver so if you're interested in a strong partnership with us and if you're interested in being one of the first launch Partners on the protocol when we launch on mainnet sometime this summer please apply to our Builder grants we want to work with you uh and we have a very strong ecosystem team that's meant to support all the project and story protocol lastly uh a couple other things on socials we have a very very active Discord come and create programmable IP memes on our Discord and ask questions if you're a developer uh also all of our developers are here so if you want to schedule a time to meet up Discord is the best place to do that and then lastly if you are interested please follow our Twitter and you can also reach me there at Json JZ so hopefully that was interesting learning about the programmable IP layer uh that's all I have thank you