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Roscosmos and Waves Enterprise launch blockchain service to protect intellectual property

The new Roscosmos service, based on the Waves Enterprise blockchain platform, is designed to detect violations of IP belonging to Roscosmos and other space industry organizations. The service brings together a wide range of subject matter experts, including patent specialists, attorneys, legal professionals and other people that can help in reducing time and costs of IP violation detection.

The workflow of the new service can be divided into three stages:

  • Connecting to the platform. As an IP rights holder, Roscosmos allocates a platform node in its infrastructure. Then the platform automatically uploads and supports the data on IP objects from Roscosmos and Rospatent. At the same time, external participants are registering on the platform as well.
  • Detecting violations. The external participants reveal the IP violations and collect detailed information on them. Then the information is recorded within the service, signed with e-signatures of the participant, the platform, and with a cryptographic timestamp. In cases of violations on the internet the platform automatically sends requests for indexing to independent external digital archives.
  • Suppressing violations. IP experts of Roscosmos receive the information to define the countermeasures. Through its smart contract, the platform gives rewards to the external participants related.

The public launch of the service was preceded by a pilot run by students from the law faculties of top Russian universities, including Russian State Academy of Intellectual Property, Bauman Moscow State Technical University, Kutafin Moscow State Law University and Saint Petersburg State University of Economics. During the pilot, the students acquired practical skills managing real-world space industry IP cases, while the developers received actionable feedback about service usability and recommendations on its future development.

As an incentive for detecting IP violations that lead to complaint management the users will receive tokens via the service’s smart contracts. These tokens can later be exchanged for merchandise from Roscosmos and other space industry organizations, as well as non-monetary rewards such as tickets to the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics.

The service will be further developed in the future. In addition to new functionality, there are plans to integrate the service with Rospatent and financial institutions in order to enable monetary rewards, while there are also plans to enable any IP rights holder to join the service.