ACAN for Patents & Trademarks

ACAN for Patents and Trademarks is the certification module for intellectual property: patents, trademarks and the royalty and licensing income they produce. Like media rights, these are pure rights with no physical object to vault or scan. ACAN certifies three things about each one: who owns it, whether it survives a challenge, and what it earns.

What it certifies

With no object to custody, the recorded assignment of the right is the control point, and public registries do the work a site visit does for real estate. Intellectual property also carries a risk the physical asset classes do not: the asset can simply vanish. A patent can be invalidated or lapse on a missed maintenance fee, and a trademark can be lost through non-use. That is why monitoring carries more weight here than anywhere else.

How a right is certified

1. Verify title. Confirm ownership through the patent and trademark office's assignment records, and through the relevant national offices abroad.
2. Test strength. Assess validity and enforceability: exposure to post-grant challenges, trademark oppositions and cancellations, freedom to operate, any standard-essential licensing commitments, and co-ownership or licensing constraints.
3. Wrap and record. Assign the rights into a special-purpose vehicle and record the assignment.
4. Certify. ACAN certifies title and strength and anchors the record on-chain.
5. Monitor. ACAN tracks registry status and royalty reports continuously, and each royalty attestation releases a payment to investors through a licensed issuer.

A strong cash story, a real decay risk

Of ACAN's rights-based modules, patents and trademarks have the strongest distribution story: licensees pay royalties, and ACAN can attest to those royalty reports much as it attests to rent. The counterweight is decay. A patent runs about twenty years from filing, a trademark lasts indefinitely only with continued use and renewal, and either can be challenged, so continuous monitoring is central rather than optional.

Related solution: Patents and IP.