Skip to main content
A piece of Intellectual Property is represented as an 🧩 IP Asset and its associated ⚙️ IP Account, a smart contract designed to serve as the core identity for each IP. We also have the 📜 Licensing Module to add functionality to IP Assets, like attaching license terms that govern how the IP can be used.
IP and licensing are the rights layer for data on the DATA Foundation. The license terms you define here are what Confidential Data Rails (CDR) uses to gate access to confidential data.
Let’s briefly introduce the layers mentioned in the above diagram:

​
🧩 IP Asset

When you want to bring an IP on-chain, you mint an ERC-721 NFT. This NFT represents ownership over your IP. Then, you register the NFT in our protocol through the IP Asset Registry. This deploys an ⚙️ IP Account, effectively creating an “IP Asset”. The address of that contract is the identifier for the IP Asset (the ipId). The underlying NFT can be traded/sold like any other NFT, and the new owner will own the IP Asset and all revenue associated with it.

​
⚙️ IP Account

IP Accounts are smart contracts that are tied to an IP Asset, and do two main things:
  1. Store the associated IP Asset’s data, such as the associated licenses and royalties created from the IP
  2. Facilitates the utilization of this data by various modules. For example, licensing, revenue/royalty sharing, remixing, and other critical features are made possible due to the IP Account’s programmability.
The address of the IP Account is the IP Asset’s identifier (the ipId).

​
📜 Licensing Module

The Licensing Module is the core module that extends the functionality of IP Accounts. It lets you attach license terms to an IP Asset and mint License Tokens from it. These terms, and the tokens minted under them, are what define who can use an IP and, via CDR, who can decrypt data gated behind it.

​
Registry

The protocol’s registries function as a primary directory/storage for the global states of the protocol. Unlike IP Accounts, which manage the state of specific IPs, a registry oversees the broader states of the protocol, for example, the IP Asset Registry tracks every registered IP Asset.

​
💊 Programmable IP License (PIL)

The PIL is a real, off-chain legal contract that defines certain License Terms for how an IP Asset can be legally licensed. For example, how an IP Asset is commercialized, remixed, or attributed, and who is allowed to do that and under what conditions. We have mapped these same terms on-chain so you can easily attach terms to your IP Asset for others to seamlessly and transparently license your IP.