Blockchain startup Story has raised $80 million in a Series B funding round.
The San Francisco-based company announced the funding on social platform X on Wednesday (August 21) and said it would use the money to help build a blockchain to prevent artificial intelligence companies from unfairly using creators' intellectual property (IP), which Storey called “one of the largest asset classes in the world.”
1/ Announced a total of $140 million in funding to build the world's largest IP blockchain, Story. pic.twitter.com/9M3tqqYcvO
— Story (꧁IP꧂) (@StoryProtocol) August 21, 2024
“Training data, AI models, memes, UGC videos, game assets, character traits, etc. are all IP,” the company said in X's post. “Everything is IP.”
The company added that with the advent of AI, IP will only become more valuable, with IP serving as fundamental input for training AI's large-scale language models.
“Simply put, without intellectual property, AI will likely plateau,” the post reads. “Story is creating a win-win future where creators can protect and grow their intellectual property in the age of AI.”
According to the company, its technology gives creators control over their intellectual property rights and allows them to set the economic terms of how AI can use their intellectual property. It also allows them to protect their intellectual property by embedding terms related to that property into smart contracts, which are self-executing agreements written on the blockchain that are designed to be executed without external approval or human input once the conditions are met.
CNBC reported on Wednesday that the funding brings Story's valuation to $2.25 billion.
In an interview last month with Christian Mammen, partner and chair of Womble Bond Dickinson's U.S. Intellectual Property Litigation Group, PYMNTS explored whether AI-generated content will “run into a brick wall” in copyright law.
“There are lots of ways that existing principles can be applied to this new technology,” Mammen said.
The modern concept of intellectual property has been around for hundreds of years, but only became part of most of the world's legal systems in the late 20th century. As AI evolves, intellectual property and copyright concepts such as fair use may need to be adapted to effectively handle generative AI-related cases.
“I don't know that we need to completely overhaul the law just to accommodate this new technology,” Mammen said, “but there may be places where it's worth talking about tweaking the law or amending the law in certain ways.”
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