EIP-5553 - Representing intellectual property on chain with Royalty Portions

EIPs
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1

Hey folks.
Proposing a standardized way to represent intellectual works on chain, along with a refined royalty representation mechanism and associated metadata. This standard is not associated with a specific type of work and could represent many types of works such as musical works, videos, books, images and more.

The standard is kept very generic on purpose to allow the industry to evolve new ecosystems that can all rely on the same basic standard at their core

2

This standard allows market participants to:

Observe the canonical on-chain representation of an intellectual work
Discover its attached metadata
Discover its related royalty rights holders
In the future, this will enable building registration, licensing and payout mechanisms for intellectual property assets.
3

There is no accepted standard mechanism to license a work, or to represent it, except using traditional NFTs. But regular NFTs only represent a collectible item use case, and cannot easily represent more complicated use cases of licensing a work for different types of uses. To enable such mechanisms, we need a more robust mechanism for :

Declaring that a work exists, SEPARATE from its purchase ability
Declaring possibly multiple interested parties to be paid for such work

for #1 no standard exists today. For #2 we only have regular splits standards based on NFT purchases, or through mechanisms like 0xsplits. While these are a great headstart, they do not contain the ability to name multiple types of collaboration participants, and more importantly, do not contain an easy way to manage the splits in a way that feels natural.

With this proposal, registration is taken care of, and splits are taken care of by defining the splits as an open array of EIP-20 tokens that represent split percentages. Moving splits to various participants will be as simple as sending an EIP-20 token from one wallet to another. discovering split movements is as simple as checking EIP-20 transfer events.

In the future, we can build full payout mechanisms based on these simple split tokens, and licensing standards on top of those payout mechanisms, which are not possible today due to the complexity of splits management in the traditional web2 world.

4

A thought: This could also fit well with EIP-2158, in that a payment for a license can be distributed to holders of the royaltyinterestTokens() holders.