Project Canon
Investment Theme(s): Economic Resilience | Stage: Explore | Status: Parked
Idea Founders: Jay Deverett
Overview:
Canon is an Intellectual Property (IP) marketplace offering an end-to-end platform for “digitalized” IP creation, collaboration, monetization, and provenance tracking.
Problem Space:
Commerce between IP “Creators” and “Curators” has reached a point of relentless friction as entertainment content has evolved into the digital age, while the copyright laws protecting its ownership have remained static since their advent alongside the printing press in the 1400s; the current system is not optimized for facilitating one-to-one transactions.
Potential Solution:
- An end-to-end platform for “digitized” IP creation allowing decentralized networks of creators, contributors, and curators to collaborate at a scale rivalling centralized institutions, without the need for trust.
- Incentives and credit are distributed across the IP ownership chain based on the value of contributions relative to their number of branches, and curators can target specific branches for licensing or purchase.
Rationale for Pausing:
The underlying technology required to enable the creation, collaboration, monetization, and provenance tracking of digitalized IP is still nascent, resulting in the need to develop a completely custom platform. The success of this platform depends on widespread buy-in and adoption by creators, communities, and curators, as well as alignment with existing IP protection standards and support from the IP enforcement ecosystem. At this time, the immediate demand among key participants appears fragmented, and the path to scalability unclear. The recommendation is to continue monitoring the marketplace and revisit this opportunity should we observe increasing demand for the ‘digitalized IP’ management.