Story Protocol (Story) has recently landed $80 million in a Series B funding to fight copyright theft by AI using blockchain technology. With this round, the company is reportedly valued at $2.25 billion and the total investment raised by Story and its parent PIP Labs to $143 million.
The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), which recently backed Setpoint and Hebbia, alongside participation from crypto-focused venture capital firm Polychain. The round also saw contributions from Scott Trowbridge (the SVP of Stability AI), K11 founder Adrian Cheng, and Cozomo de’ Medici, the digital art collector.
Copyright theft with AI
For decades, the internet has operated on an implicit economic covenant between creators and platforms. Writers allow search engines to index their articles in the hope of driving traffic to their sites. Artists upload images and videos to social networks to build audiences. The system worked because it benefited both parties.
Advances in generative AI are likely to break this covenant. A new wave of AI-powered search engines give comprehensive answers instead of guiding users to websites. Social networks are increasingly populated by AI-generated images and videos. These AI systems are trained on original, human-created content but often don’t credit or cite their sources. If there’s no attribution or compensation, what incentive will there be to publish original creations on the open internet?
What does Story do?
Story Protocol was founded by Seung Yoon Lee three years ago, after he sold his company Radish Fiction to Kakao. He joined co-founder Jason Zhao, a Stanford graduate and a former executive at DeepMind.
It is a blockchain protocol that allows creators to register their intellectual property so they can track and monitor use, ensuring their legal and economic rights are protected. This ensures that creators of original content are rewarded, no matter how their content gets used and distributed.
Meanwhile, licensing IP becomes low friction and standardised, encouraging widespread sharing and collaboration. The goal is to create foundational infrastructure that can underpin a new economic covenant between creators and platforms.
Projects using Story
Some examples of projects that are building on top of Story include Magma, collaborative art platform enabling artists to register their IP; Sekai, an AI storytelling platform that helps storytellers, artists, and fans co-create immersive interactive stories via simple prompts; and Ablo by Space Runners, which uses generative AI to customise and remix the latest fashions.
