πŸ•΅οΈ Story Attestation Service

A multi-layered decentralized approach to validating intellectual property.

Skip the Read - 1 Minute Summary

You can think of the Story Attestation Service (SAS) as a bunch of independent service providers (infringement, identity, etc) each proving the validity of an IP in their own way. So that each IP has a set of "badges" on it displaying the results.

It's then up to the ecosystem/market to determine which providers they trust or want to believe. This becomes a decentralized "validator"-like approach to IP validity, where if an IP Asset has lots of providers saying it is valid, then it probably valid.

Story employs a multi-layered decentralized approach to validating intellectual property, grounded in two foundational components:

  1. The Story Attestation Service (SAS): leverages a network of specialized service providers β€” each detecting copyright violations across different mediums (images, audio, etc) β€” to provide transparent, publicly accessible signals on the legitimacy of an 🧩 IP Asset. Applications that facilitate IP registration (e.g. original content) may also attest to the provenance of an IP asset (called "apptestations") in the future.
  2. The ❌ Dispute Module: offers a flexible framework for resolving conflicts, tapping both on-chain and off-chain processes to accommodate the nuanced nature of IP disputes.

This blend of detection methods and dispute resolution creates a robust ecosystem that allows IP to be registered without introducing undue friction, while letting the market, and individual ecosystem apps, determine how much weight to give each attestation provider.

These layers make up the IP Validation Service (IPVS) - a fully decentralized marketplace of trust. The existing system of detection providers will continue to expand into a broader ecosystem of signal contributors, each able to offer specialized, verifiable assessments of IP authenticity. Through incentivized participation, IPVS fosters a self-sustaining market where different validators collaborate to deliver specialized signals.

So rather than preventing duplicates, which would cause far more potentially disruptive front running risk, the signals and attestations allow the original IPs surface above the rest.

"When does the SAS scan my IP?"

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Quick Note

It's important to note that the Story Attestation Service only runs IP infringement checks on commercial IP. That is, IP Assets who have at least one License Terms where commercialUse = true.

If your IP is non-commercial, then this section doesn't apply to you.

When registering your IP on Story, you pass in IP-specific metadata that implements the πŸ“ IPA Metadata Standard. In this standard, you'll see 3 fields:

Property NameTypeDescription
mediaUrlstringUsed for infringement checking, points to the actual media (ex. image or audio)
mediaHashstringHashed string of the media using SHA-256 hashing algorithm. See here for how that is done.
mediaTypestringType of media (audio, video, image), based on mimeType. See the allowed media types here.

These are used for the commercial infringement check. Whatever media you pass in through mediaUrl will be checked by our infringement detection providers and flagged if infringement is detected.

If you do not pass in these media.* fields, then an infringement detection will not be performed and your IP will not be proven valid.

Current Limitations

  • You must set the media.* fields before attaching commercial terms (commercialUse = true), otherwise no check will be performed.
  • Attestations will only show up on the IP Portal (our "GitHub for IP" platform coming soon). We are working on publishing attestations to public record so anyone can access the results (COMING SOON!).
  • Only media that is existing on the internet will be detected. If someone registers new IP on Story, it will simply return validated because our providers don't have data on it.

Current Providers

Becoming an Attestation Provider

The Story Attestation Service is undergoing active development. If you run any form of IP validation (infringement, identity, origin, etc), then you can become an attestation provider. To do so, please fill out this form.