Protecting Innovation: Patent Applications for Streaming & Watch2Earn Tech

By DeHub Team — 2023-04-03

In Q2 2023 we commenced patent applications covering our core streaming technology and watch-to-earn mechanics.

The obvious objection

A project built on decentralisation, open protocols and verifiable-by-anyone infrastructure filing patents is a fair thing to raise an eyebrow at. We have raised it internally.

The position we settled on is narrow and worth stating precisely.

What the applications cover

The specific mechanisms we built — how watch-to-earn is measured and settled, and particular pieces of our streaming implementation. Not the concept of streaming. Not the idea that viewers might earn. Implementations.

Why file at all

Defensive priority. The realistic risk to a small company is not that someone copies you. It is that a much larger company independently patents something you already built, and then asserts it against you. Establishing priority is protection against being locked out of your own work.

It is what a serious project does. DeHub holds real registrations and takes the obligations that come with them seriously. Intellectual property is part of that, and partners and investors ask about it.

Watch-to-earn was novel enough to be worth it. By 2023 there was a genuine body of implementation behind it, and it was being widely imitated with varying degrees of honesty. Establishing what we had actually built, and when, had value.

The tension we accept

Patents are exclusionary by design, and decentralisation is not. That is a real contradiction and we are not going to argue it away.

What we can point to is behaviour. When a group of large holders forked the DeHub app to target the adult market later that same year, we did not obstruct it. We transferred knowledge and provided technical support to the fork team, and then wrote a framework for future community-driven forks.

That was one quarter after these filings and it is the clearest available evidence of how we intend to use them. As it was put at the time: with open-source technology and blockchain industry culture, permissionless innovation matters more than our preferences, and we cannot stop someone forking our app and airdropping our holders — nor should we try.

There is also now an open-source end-to-end encryption implementation in the platform, which is not the behaviour of a company using IP as a moat.

The plain version

We filed to avoid being excluded from our own work, not to exclude anyone from theirs. If that ever stops being true, this paragraph should be held against us.

What we will not do with them

Three commitments, stated so they can be checked against future conduct.

We will not assert them against a community fork of DeHub. That was tested within a quarter of filing and the answer was to help the fork rather than obstruct it.

We will not use them against a project on the basis that it competes with us. Competition is the mechanism by which this industry improves, and a patent used to prevent it is doing the opposite of what we filed for.

We will not acquire patents for the purpose of assertion. Defensive filing on work we actually did is a different activity from building a portfolio to license, and the second one is not a business we intend to be in.