The End of IP Laws: How Decentralization and Crypto are Making Enforcers Powerless

Intellectual property (IP) laws will be significantly harder to enforce in a world dominated by digitally monetized assets. Here’s why:

1. Anonymity and Pseudonymity: In traditional lawsuits, the plaintiff can usually locate the defendant. In the metaverse, users are often anonymous or pseudonymous, making them hard to find.

2. Seizure of Assets: Traditional payment systems and physical assets are much easier to seize or confiscate. In contrast, digital assets like cryptocurrencies are much harder to track and seize.

Imagine I create an unlicensed Superman movie as an individual and sell it online for Bitcoin or any self custodial cryptocurrency.

To enforce IP laws, authorities would need to:

1. Find me.
2. Ensure I am in a jurisdiction where they can enforce their laws, which is becoming increasingly difficult with increasing global decentralization.
3. Impose their will on me. Also increasing in difficulty especially at scale.
4. Somehow force me to turn over assets that they cannot directly seize or otherwise confiscate even if they killed me.

As a result, enforcing IP laws would become prohibitively expensive and time-consuming, making it time consuming, costly and impractical to pursue most violators who are savvy enough to leverage these decentralized systems.