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When blockchain, and cryptocurrencies, burst on the scene, they were hailed by proponents as yet another digital disruption of traditional power structures that could make wealth more accessible and decision-making more democratic. However, there is a common pattern of companies using digital innovation to disrupt traditional economies in order to generate private profit, in part by exploiting the gap between the introduction of new technologies and the introduction of regulations designed to curb their abuse. Tech startups tend to play up the benefits and downplay the negative effects of such disruptions. When the two major ride-share services launched, just over a decade ago, they dwelt on how the “sharing economy” could reduce car ownership, and hence pollution, and provide accessible, flexible work opportunities to folk with time and wheels to spare. As it turns out, ride-share companies generate 70 percent more pollution than the trips they displace, increase congestion, and undermine public transportation. Their profits are built on exploitative labor practices, and the companies are engaged in a running battle to defeat legislation that would force them to actually employ their drivers, with attendant labor protections, rather than treating them as disposable contractors. They did indeed divert wealth from one set of people (who owned taxi medallions) to another (the CEOs and shareholders), but not in a way that fostered economic equity.

Similarly, businesses built around blockchain play up how the technology can make the world more transparent, equitable, and democratic. And indeed, by disrupting the middleman, whether that is a bank or an art dealer, they have created economic access and financial opportunities for some people who were shut out by traditional power structures. Some artists, for example affirm that NFTs provided them with access and exposure they never had through traditional art spaces, which are often predominantly white and male. (Also, during the pandemic, sales of digital art buoyed artists’ incomes while tourism tanked and traditional place-based markets shut down.) But cryptocurrency, which is the economic driver for blockchain platforms, is especially advantageous people who want to evade oversight, detection, and regulation, often for nefarious purposes that include money laundering, extortion via ransomware, and illegal commerce. While there is a lot of talk about how blockchain could, theoretically, reduce wealth inequality by distributing ownership and control of capital, in actual practice the distribution of Bitcoin (for example) mirrors wealth inequality overall. Speculating in cryptocurrency is a high-risk venture, with extreme and rapid cycles of boom and bust, and people who already have deep financial capacity are best able to bear that risk.

In January 2021, Congress enacted the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2021,50 which includes the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020. The statute updates U.S. anti-money laundering laws, significantly expands the U.S. government’s authority to subpoena documents held by foreign banks overseas, and codifies a $50,000 daily fine for failing to comply with subpoenas. The act also preserves the government’s ability to terminate foreign correspondent accounts in the U.S. financial system, which is a financial “death penalty” for foreign banks that do not comply.51

The U.N. Panel of Experts recommended that member states should implement Financial Action Task Force standards and “that to manage and mitigate the risks emerging from virtual assets,” such assets should be subject to enhanced monitoring and compliance standards.52 The United States could augment its technical warning notices to include increased emphasis on identifying North Korean attacks, specific actors and their virtual coin “wallets,” and techniques used against cryptocurrency exchanges.

It might surprise you to learn that the federal government is ahead of the curve when it comes to blockchain technology—but it’s true, says SIMBA Chain CEO Bryan Ritchie. “They’ve been the early adopters,” Ritchie said. To date, Plymouth-based SIMBA Chain (SIMBA stands for Simple Blockchain Applications) has secured more than a dozen contracts to help federal agencies implement blockchain technology—and the company recently landed a Multiple Award Schedule contract that opens up the potential for much more federal work. The MAS contract means that SIMBA Chain is now a preferred vendor for the federal government. The 20-year contract allows the company to do business with any federal government agency, giving the company more flexibility to work with other contractors and go after more jobs. “What this contract really allows us to do now is be really proactive,” Ritchie said. SIMBA Chain was incubated at the University of Notre Dame, and it launched as a company in 2017. Currently, Ritchie said, SIMBA Chain earns most of its revenue from government contracts. To date, most of those contracts have been with various branches of the military. Blockchain technology offers a way to securely record and confirm online transactions. Each transaction forms a “block,” these blocks make up a chain, and the system is designed as a cheat-proof and more secure way to conduct transactions. The technology can be used in applications ranging from manufacturing supply chains to financial records to food sourcing, among others. One reason the military has been an early blockchain adopter, Ritchie said, is that the technology can bring transparency to complex supply chains and systems. In one of its government contracts, Ritchie said, SIMBA Chain built a blockchain supply-chain solution for Boeing so the aircraft maker could more easily track parts for the F/A-18 fighter jets Boeing is building for the Navy. SIMBA Chain says its technology has reduced paperwork on the project by 40%. On another contract, SIMBA Chain is working with the Space Force on a project that will track satellites and space debris. Currently, Ritchie said, about 75% of SIMBA Chain’s revenue comes from government contracts. The rest comes from commercial customers, such as Mexico-based restaurant chain Toks, which uses a blockchain-based system to track coffee beans from farm to consumer. Over the next two years, Ritchie said, he believes commercial growth will begin to accelerate as private companies begin to follow the government’s lead in adopting blockchain technology. By the end of 2023, he predicts, the company’s revenue will be about evenly split between government and commercial customers. By the end of 2024, it should be more like 25% government and 75% commercial. And having the military and other federal agencies as early customers, Ritchie said, should help convince private companies that SIMBA Chain can handle their projects. “If we can do it for the military, we can do it for anybody,” Ritchie said. “It’s given us great credibility.”

Blockchain technology is forecast to increase to nearly 1,000 trillion U.S. dollars by 2032, but this was lower than in a previous forecast. This is according to a market research forecast, focusing on blockchain with cloud applications for specific business segments. The numbers do not include decentralized applications such as blockchain gaming. Originally, a forecast from June 2022 predicted "blockchain technology" would reach 1,235 billion U.S. dollars by 2030, at a CAGR of 82.8 percent. A newer forecast from December 2023 predicts a value of 943 billion U.S. dollars in 2032 with a CAGR of 56.1 percent. The source does not explain this difference.

With another boom and bust cycle behind us, it's time to assess crypto’s progress along the adoption curve. Has crypto taken two steps forward and one step back, or was visible progress made over the last bull market?

This article will review crypto adoption among both retail and institutional investors, and show that more investors than ever are holding crypto, including traditionally conservative groups like family offices, publicly traded companies, and financial advisors.

The possible future adoption and implementation of blockchain technology by IPR registries might bring with it significant advantages. First of all, the biggest potential (and the most beneficial scenario) for the adoption of blockchain is the development of a fully automated IPR registration process that would make it possible to assert one's IP rights without human intervention or even requiring an institution. However, we must admit that it is very unlikely such implementation will be finalized within the next 5–10 years, even in countries like USA, China, Germany and Japan that are viewed as pioneers of blockchain technology. But, once again, we must emphasize that blockchain technology is capable of providing great benefits even on the way to final implementation, which it can achieve by facilitating the registration process (i.e., making it faster and lowering the costs of registration). Finally, as discussed above, blockchain can help legal practitioners and right holders to protect and enforce their rights by offering an easier method of providing proof to the IP courts.

Blockchain technology has existed for less than a decade and can be considered still to be in its infancy. Therefore, talking about blockchain's future at this very early stage is almost like speculating about the future of the internet back in 1980s. Just as one wouldn't be able to conceive of or talk about Facebook, Airbnb or even internet banking in their current forms back in the Reagan era, it is not very easy to predict where blockchain technology might take us in the next 20 or 30 years. However, we can already foresee that blockchain technology will face various challenges from at least four different aspects, namely: (i) technical, (ii) marketing/business, (iii) behavioral/educational, and (iv) legal/regulatory.18 For the purposes of this paper, our main focus will be the potential legal and regulatory challenges to this emerging technology.

One of the most significant challenges currently facing blockchain technology, which should be of crucial interest to any legal practitioner, arises from the use of blockchain as a transaction platform. This is because “[a] blockchain network can validate a variety of value-related transactions relating to digital money or assets that have been digitized.”19 Value-related transactions encompass, besides monetary transactions, transactions relating to land, debt, or intellectual property.

The main challenge facing the widespread adoption of blockchains for the enforcement of IP rights is the difficulty of explaining and understanding the complexities of the underlying technology. Today, in most countries, even the challenges and intricacies of online counterfeiting have not yet been adequately examined or comprehended by the enforcement authorities. In light of this fact, it is not difficult to guess that getting enforcement authorities to use a cutting-edge technology such as blockchain to protect IP rights will require a vast amount of persuasion and training. The application(s) must be constructed in a way that is relatively simple and easy to use. This is a crucial attribute that such applications must have, considering the wide range of possible users and their varying levels of technological adeptness. Not everybody has the will, talent or desire to learn how to code in order to create a smart contract. Therefore, applications with simple and easy-to-use interfaces will be essential in this field.

Another significant challenge could arise out of the nature of blockchain technology. The critics of the use of this technology in the field of intellectual property are mostly on the same page regarding this issue.65 These critics agree that the size of the data created would be enormous if this vision was realized and copyright management was carried out by using blockchain technology. Since the users of the system are also the nodes of the system in a blockchain, each one of them would need to store quite massive amounts of data. The solution to this problem may lie in the rapid development and improvement of the existing blockchain technology. In this context, looking at past technological developments could provide us with a sense of hope, once we realize how the meaning of “massive amounts of data” has changed in recent years. A USB flash drive with 64 MB storage capacity was first introduced in 2003, merely 15 years ago.66 Today, Kingston offers USB flash drives that can store up to two TB of data, which corresponds to a storage capacity that is more than 30,000 times bigger than the capacity offered by the most advanced USB flash drives just 15 years ago. Considering this exponential growth in storage capacity in the past 15 years, it would not be unreasonable to predict that the question of “storage space” for global music data will one day become obsolete. Nevertheless, at least for the time being, it is up to the software developers to address and resolve this issue.

While Blockchain technology has promising applications in the field of intellectual property, its widespread adoption could be slowed by the lack of clear rules governing how it can be used and what should happen in the event of a dispute. This goes back to the perennial issue of technology far outpacing the development of the law. The big challenge to the use of Blockchain in the area of intellectual property rights is establishing the appropriate jurisdiction and law to apply when a dispute occurs.'® The issue arises because of Blockchain’s decentralized nature. In a Blockchain, information is stored in distributed ledgers across the world via a network of individual participants called “nodes”.!” As this is a decentralized database in which nodes can be physically located anywhere in the world, figuring out which court has the authority to adjudicate a dispute and what rules it should apply can be challenging.''® The risk is that Blockchain transactions could fall under the jurisdiction of all of the nodes, and thus under a multiplicity of legal regimes.'!!

Taking copyright law. While international treaties recognise copyright protection in multiple jurisdictions, there is no “international copyright”, and copyright works are protected under the copyright laws of each country.'’> National jurisdictions differ greatly in certain aspects of copyright law. For instance, under the interpretation of originality, there are four different families of standards, ranging from the strictest to most generous.' These include: the EU’s personal intellectual creation standard, the United States’ Feist standard, Canada’s CCH standard, and the United Kingdom’s skill and labor standard. Additionally, countries are free to apply different types of exhaustion doctrine: “national exhaustion” in countries such as Russia and Brazil, “regional exhaustion” in the EU and “international exhaustion”''* in the US. Moreover, the terms of copyright protection also vary in different countries. The Berne Convention,'> for instance, sets a minimum protection standard of only 50 years, and while some countries, including China, follow the international treaty, some other jurisdictions such as US and EU have moved to 70 years of protection.

IT’S BEEN IMPOSSIBLE to avoid hearing about NFTs in recent months. Hype for the tokens—pitched as proof of ownership of a digital item—has reached a fever pitch, while billions of dollars have poured into the market for them. To some, these non-fungible tokens are the hottest new collectible hobby, to others a powerful investment tool, and still more, they’re the future of the internet.

The reality is, as always, more complex. In their current state, NFTs aren’t actually capable of doing much of what they’re often claimed to do. The extremely technical nature of how NFTs, blockchains, and cryptocurrencies work means that it’s easy to simplify the explanation of the tech to the point of being misleading.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) can boost artist income and expand brand appeal. However, according to a new report by U.S. copyright and trademark regulators, intellectual property rights (IP) infringement is rampant in the industry.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and Copyright Office published a joint study delving into IP rights in NFTs. The study, conducted following a request by a Congressional committee, solicited comments from the public and held three public roundtables in January 2023.

Another potential biorisk is the threat posed by unintentional release of pathogens from research laboratories. Ord notes that biological research is progressing quickly:

Progress is continuing at a rapid pace. The last ten years have seen major qualitative breakthroughs, such as the use of CRISPR to efficiently insert new genetic sequences into a genome and the use of gene drives to efficiently replace populations of natural organisms in the wild with genetically modified versions. Measures of this progress suggest it is accelerating, with the cost to sequence a genome falling by a factor of 10,000 since 2007 and with publications and venture capital investment growing quickly. This progress in biotechnology seems unlikely to fizzle out soon: there are no insurmountable challenges looming; no fundamental laws blocking further developments.

Others have echoed the same line. For example, in a study of risks from `do-it-yourself’ biological science, David Sarpong and colleagues consider the risk that sophisticated technologies may be readily available to malicious actors. They respond, echoing Ben Ouagrham-Gormley, that it is not the mere availability of technology but also a rich tapestry of expert knowledge that is required to synthesize and distribute advanced bioweapons, and that this knowledge is unlikely to be available to nonstate actors.

Among the possible safety risks, Mukunda et al. (2009) warn that, considering the history of computer hacking where people with malicious intent create software viruses for nefarious purposes, the democratisation of synthetic biology would make the technology readily available to individuals and groups who would use it to intentionally cause harm. However, some analysts note the high improbability of this scenario, given that the effective use of synthetic biology techniques relies on skills and techniques that cannot be easily codified (in this case not easily found on the internet), but instead are acquired through a hugely lengthy process of ‘learning by doing’ or ‘learning by example’. This is what these analysts refer to as ‘tacit knowledge’ (Revill and Jefferson, 2013; Jefferson et al., 2014). Here, we draw on the discussions as presented by Tucker (2011) and Jefferson et al. (2014) in order to reveal the dynamics of the biosecurity risk assessment. In the assessment of risk of misuse, it becomes pertinent to differentiate among potential actors according to their financial assets and technical capabilities – from states with well-developed bio-warfare programmes, to terrorist organisations of varying size and sophistication, or individual hackers motivated by ideological or other grievances. As revealed by the study of state-level bio-warfare programmes, the production of biological weapons necessitates an interdisciplinary team of experts with expansive knowledge in fields such as microbiology, aerobiology etc. States are therefore generally more capable of organising and sustaining such teams than non-state actors.

Effective altruists often draw attention to experiments in which a single feature of a virus was manipulated: for example, the virus was made more virulent or more transmissible. But that is not what omnicidal actors need. They need a virus which is improved on a great number of dimensions at once: it must be quite virulent; highly transmissible; have the desired incubation time; resist likely treatments and antibodies; survive storage and transportation across the globe; and so on.

The problem is that we do not know how to induce all of these many mutations at once, and indeed there is a good chance that work done to produce one mutation may cut against other desired mutations. A bioweapons expert interviewed by Filippa Lentzos explains:

The main reason why scientists and policymakers are skeptical of existential biorisk is that it is terribly hard to engineer a pandemic that kills everyone.

First, you would need to reach everyone. The virus would have to be transmitted to the most rural and isolated corners of the earth; to antarctic research stations; to ships at sea, including nuclear submarines on uncharted, long-term and isolated paths; to doomsday preppers in their bunkers; to hermits and uncontacted tribes; to astronauts in space; to each new child born every second; to island nations; and so on. And you would need a transmission mechanism that could spread the virus this far without being detected: otherwise, those with the means would be whisked away to safety and might well survive.

We’ve seen throughout Parts 9, 10 and 11 of this series that it is extremely difficult to engineer a pathogen which could lead to existential catastrophe. Ord seems to be claiming not only that such a pathogen could be developed in this century, but also that states may soon develop such a pathogen as a form of mutually assured destruction. Both claims need substantial argument, the latter not least because humanity already has access to a much more targeted deterrent in the form of nuclear weapons. That isn’t to say that Ord’s claim here is false, but it is to say that a single sentence won’t do. If there is a serious case to be made that states can, and soon may develop pathogens which could lead to existential catastrophe in order to deter others, that case needs to be made with the seriousness and care that it deserves.

Ord notes that historical data does not reflect substantial casualties from bioweapons. However, Ord suggests, we may have too little data to generalize from, and in any case the data suggests a “power law” distribution of fatalities that may favor high estimates of existential risk. That’s fair enough, though we saw in Part 12 that power law estimates of existential biorisk face substantial difficulties, and also that the most friendly published power law estimate puts the risks orders of magnitude lower than Ord does.

Most events pose existential risks of this magnitude or lower, so if Ord wants us to accept that natural pandemics have a 1/10,000 chance of leading to irreversible existential catastrophe by 2100, Ord owes us a solid argument for this conclusion. It is certainly far from obvious: for example, devastating as the COVID-19 pandemic was, I don’t think anyone believes that 10,000 random re-rolls of the COVID-19 pandemic would lead to at least one existential catastrophe. The COVID-19 pandemic just was not the sort of thing to pose a meaningful threat of existential catastrophe, so if natural pandemics are meant to go beyond the threat posed by the recent COVID-19 pandemic, Ord really should tell us how they do so.

Ord begins by surveying four historical pandemics: the Plague of Justinian, Black Death, Columbian Exchange, and Spanish Flu. Ord notes that while each of these events led to substantial loss of life, most were met with surprising resilience.

The Wildfire scenario requires the introduction of a lethal pandemic agent capable of spreading through populations of essential workers in every nation, even after they adjust their workflows to minimise human contact. The Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 plausibly sufficed. Drawing from data on its spread in previously naive Chinese populations in the months before and just after the relaxation of that country's zero-COVID policy, Omicron likely exhibits an R0 between 4.0 and 5.5 with an upper bound of 6.8 (see Appendix 1). We therefore define a Wildfire pathogen as one exhibiting a case fatality rate above 20% and a basic reproduction number exceeding 5.5. Only one pandemic pathogen in the four thousand years in which densely populated cities and frequently used trade routes have been key features of civilisation,22 i.e. the variola major virus that causes smallpox, has been both highly lethal (~30% case fatality rate) and could be sufficiently contagious (R0=3.5-6.0).23 Therefore, historical inference suggests that the annual chance of a natural Wildfire pandemic is somewhere between negligible and a theoretical maximum of 0.1% (see Appendix 1).

3. How has the current state of patent eligibility directly impacted the development of new medical technologies? Can you provide specific examples where patent eligibility issues have hindered innovation?

There is no question in my mind as to whether the current state of patent eligibility has diminished innovation. I addressed this with specific examples in my answer to Question 1. I also know that there have been significant shifts in the types of invention that attract venture capital and other investors, and I can say unequivocally that weaknesses in the patent system have diminished both the number of entrepreneurs and the number of investors willing to assume the risk of longer term development projects. Creating a new technology requires both dedicated entrepreneurs and dedicated investors, both of whom may be motivated by the desire of benefitting other people and their nation, but both nevertheless need to be able to justify the expenditure of human resources and capital to support the effort. This in a nutshell is what patents provide, and without it, these entrepreneurs and investors are likely to pursue other activities.

The current state of the U.S. patent regime regarding patenting biomedical data and genomic processes and the announcement from the Biden Administration to waive patent protection for COVID-19 vaccines is a problem according to many in the pharmaceutical industry and other patent advocates. 66 It is especially harmful with the current global pandemic.67 First, genomic and biomedical data patents encourage innovation and provide inventive protection to researchers and inventors who seek to introduce new methods of identifying and curing viral infections.68 The pharmaceutical industry needs to be motivated by making profits when they make huge investments upfront and it can take many years to continue creating effective vaccines that combat the COVID-19 virus and its variants.69 The pharmaceutical industry needs to have sufficient guidance and a more substantial grasp on what is considered patent-eligible and broaden the scope of medical patents in times of increased technology and biomedical innovation and experimentation. 70 Such changes are essential to encouraging these companies to realize some gain that incentivizes the continuation of such innovation for researching the COVID-19 vaccines and other viruses for future pandemics.71 The policy decision to waive patent protections on the COVID-19 vaccines raises fear of a dangerous, unwanted precedent.72 There is difficulty in providing incentives for the future because patent protections were created to incentivize via short-term monopoly profits so that firms and individuals can invest in innovation.73 In the face of a public emergency, this temporary waiver sets a scary precedent that makes firms and individuals doubt whether they will want to invest next time there's an emergency. 74