How Blockchain Helps Secure Product Ownership

Developing a new technology is both complicated and expensive. In most cases, innovators spend decades working on a single concept that might not even be commercially viable. Big companies have the financial muscle to pay inventors, fund their R&D, and own their technologies. Sometimes such companies steal or copy from the original developers who often are smaller companies without the same resources. However, blockchain can help prevent intellectual property theft or abuse.

Bigger companies have huge financial resources allowing them to recruit highly skilled experts. Imagine working with an engineer to develop a technology from scratch. Without a proper understanding between the CEO and the engineer, your company’s technology is at risk. Well-established companies can offer several times as much as your company is paying your engineer. When he or she leaves the company, the idea that worked for your company will almost certainly be duplicated and even enhanced at another company. Sometimes big companies also try to buy off small manufacturers who seem to be successful.

It is also vital to protect the systems that store the original source code or blueprints of the technology that made a business successful. Sometimes employees steal business technology and give it to the competitors. When signing an agreement with internal technical teams and technology partners, it is vital to include equity in the contract as well as non-disclosure clauses. This will prevent any member of the team with legal access to the company’s vital resources from misusing them.

What Blockchain Is and How It Works

The blockchain protocol groups transactions into blocks. Whenever new transactions happen, new blocks are added to the network by decentralized nodes. Each new block in the network replicates the chain of blocks before it. All the blocks in the network function together to verify the validity of the other blocks, and broadcast the completed block to other nodes in the network.

Some blockchains use proof-of-work consensus. When a block is mined, all the nodes in the network must prove that they are confirming the same valid information in the ledger. The principal is that a majority nodes would confirm the right information at the expense of the few malicious nodes that would want to confirm the wrong information. In this way, the blockchain is kept secure and accurate.