The Worldwide Property Rights Registry™
The Worldwide Property Rights Registry™ (TWPRR™, the Registry) has the potential to be the go-to source for anyone wanting to protect their property rights. The Registry can prevent unscrupulous operators from selling things they don’t own or from selling more than 100% of what they do own (just like the two fellows in the show The Producers). What’s more, TWPRR™ could do this for both real world assets (RWA), intellectual properties of all sorts, and virtual properties that exist only in the metaverse.
Moreover, the Registry can provide this protection the world over, with almost no limitations.
Properties, Rights, and Relationships
“Property is a relation of a person, juristic person or entity with an object upon which such person holds a right” (Bhandari, 2019) [emphasis added].
Bhandari’s words succinctly call out the three essential elements needed to articulate property rights.
- Object
- Right
- Relation
Objects
Every property is an object. It is irrelevant if the object is tangible or intangible, movable or immovable, or even no more than an idea, an algorithm, or a computer program.
While most artwork is born when an artist turns an idea into a tangible creation, the death of those same pieces of art is highly uncertain. Many artworks are destroyed within a few years of their creation, museums are filled with pieces which have been preserved for millennia.
While most of the books which filled the famous library of Alexandria in Egypt are gone to dust and ash, we have other written works which predate that famous library.
Although most buildings, bridges, and other man-made structures crumble in less than a century, some still stand which were raised thousands of years ago.
Beneath all of these properties, there is the very ground upon which we walk, live, grow our crops, and build our homes and cities. Can anyone authoritatively say what is the lifespan of a plot of ground?
Once a property is created in the Registry it becomes a persistent entity. This is partly a function of blockchain technology. It is also a function of the design of the Registry. Persistent entities in the Registry aren’t “burned.” Many lack anything resembling a clearly defined finite lifespan.
Obviously, people too are objects. They too enjoy persistency in the Registry. However, the role of people within the Registry is limited to granting or receiving rights to a property.
Bundle of Rights
When the authors of the US Declaration of Independence wrote of being “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights” the invocation of deity conveyed with it the concept of the eternal nature of rights. Rights exist independent of individual actors or sovereign powers. Denying the existence of rights is like denying the existence of life. Attempting to deny the legitimate exercise of rights is fraught with danger for any person or government. Denial or deprivation of the lawful exercise of rights goes against the inherent nature of humankind, individually and collectively, and often results in violence.
Efforts to preserve the lawful exercise of rights are inherently worthy of the best efforts of individuals, collectives, and governments (Sovereigns).
Each property inherently is linked to a bundle of rights. The nature of those rights changes with each type of property. Rights to a property endure while a property exists. If the property ceases to exist, then all rights associated with that property also cease to exist.
Rights too are persistent in the Registry. Rights associated with each property don’t have a finite lifespan, they exist as long as the property exists.
Relationships
Relationships are the glue which defines and constrains so much of our world. Two individual people can be defined very succinctly and meaningfully through their relationship, even absent knowing any other attributes of either or both individuals.
Siblings. That single word can define and constrain two or more people even if you don’t know their gender, nationality, religion, age, or any other attribute. Even living or dead are secondary to that one relationship.
Creator. That relationship defines one object to another and offers actual and implied constraints that significantly alter how we deal with both objects defined by the relationship.
The list of examples showing the far-reaching effects of relationships between objects is large.
For the Registry there are just two essential relationships: owner and lessee.
Property Types
The bundle of rights associated with each property varies with the property type. Although there are two basic property types, these can be subdivided based on certain attributes.
- Real Property – tangible and immovable (can’t be moved without damaging it)
- Personal Property – tangible and movable (chattels such as appliances, automobiles, artwork, machinery, crops, timber, etc.) and intangibles (e.g., securities, bonds, franchises, bank accounts, mortgages, liens, copyrights, licenses, etc.)
For the purposes of the law, “personal” means both natural persons and legal entities, either of which can own property in their own name.
Movable property can be moved from one place to another without any damage. Immovable property, on the other hand, cannot be moved and those things which are attached to the earth, with certain exceptions (crops, timber, and grass are notable exceptions). (Bhandari, 2019)
Delivery of movable property effectively completes the legal transfer process, although a bill of sale is often helpful as supporting documentation. In some jurisdictions a bill of sale (or equivalent) is required to substantiate legal transfer and ownership. In contrast, transfer of immovable property almost always requires registering the name of the transferee with a sovereign authority. Likewise, transfer of intellectual property usually requires registration of the name of the transferee with a sovereign authority.
NFT and RWA
New properties, particularly the intangible type, are being invented nearly every day. The rise of cryptocurrencies has spawned the creation of NFT (non-fungible tokens), which can stand alone as a property, or attach to some non-digital asset (AKA real world asset or RWA), such as real estate. While the ownership of an NFT is verifiable on the respective blockchain, asserting rights from an NFT to RWA is largely uncharted territory. In fact, most governments don’t currently recognize any NFT claim on RWA. This leaves buyers of RWA-based NFT legally unprotected if they need to enforce their rights. It also makes this entire market space a prime target for thieves. The problem of legally registering and protecting rights in this market space is a problem TWRPP is designed to solve.
Metaverse Properties
The Registry can also be used to manage rights within the metaverse for virtual properties. As the metaverse expands into a collection of going concerns with both private and public interests, providing sovereign-level protection of property rights in that space will be very valuable to many.
Impermanent Relationships
TWPRR™ inherently acknowledges two types of relationships towards property rights. They are ownership and lease agreements. Although we think of ownership as permanent and leases as temporary, both are temporary. Both relationships can be voluntarily and involuntarily transferred or otherwise terminated. Some may begin or end as part of the normal operation of contracts. Others may be involuntarily ended by death.
Rights v Properties
Because of these, each property won’t have a direct owner. Rather, each property is a bundle of rights and each of the rights is owned (and can be leased). Ownership of each right can be transferred as a bundle or singularly. Likewise, it can be transferred or leased as a bundle or singularly.
An intellectual property whose copyright expires has its copyright transferred to the public domain as the owner.
An abandoned house could have its ownership rights forcibly transferred to a sovereign, or other entity.
Data Structures to Support TWPRR
Figure 1 is a rough sketch of the basic TWPRR data structure. A key point of this design is the support for multiple, fractional owners and multiple, fractional lease holders. In this case, a lease represents any temporary transfer of some right from the owner to another party, subordinate to the owner’s rights.
This temporary transfer of a right could be either a rental agreement where the owner grants rights of occupancy to a tenant (lessee), or a lien where the owner’s right to collect rents or royalties is temporarily transferred by a court order or other legal instrument to a creditor through a Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) lien, or a mechanic’s lien.
Figure 1 Rough Sketch of Basic Data Structure
Support for Multiple Property Types
TWPRR™ enables rights management for a variety of different property types. The specific list of rights available for a given property depends upon the property type, i.e., real property has a different list of available rights than those associated with intellectual property.
Each property has a specific list of enumerated Rights (1 to n). Each right has at least one Owner and can have multiple Owners (1 to n). Each Owner has claim to a portion of each right. The portion can range from zero to 100%. The Owner for one right associated with a given property may or may not be the same person (or entity) for all the rights associated with a given property. Each ownership claim must have acceptable, legally legitimate, and binding documentation of their ownership.
Subordinate Rights Support
Every Owner can lease out a portion, or all, of their property right to one or more Lessee. Each Lessee must have acceptable, legally legitimate, and binding documentation of their lease.
The beauty of TWPR is that the documentation can be supplemented with, or take the form of, an NFT such as a fractional ownership NFT.
Liens
Liens against property which could include mortgages, mechanics liens, and Universal Commercial Code (UCC) liens, to name a few, represent legitimate clouds on property rights. TWPRR must allow the application and satisfaction of liens. Depending on the lien type and the property type, liens can impact one or more property rights. For instance, a UCC lien on a residential rental property can usurp the owner’s right to collect rents until the lien is satisfied.
Liens will need to be registered and removed under the authority of a Sovereign Key. They will require documentation and include contact information for the lienholder. This is true both for registration and satisfaction.
Fractional Ownership
With fractional ownerships documented in TWPRR™ and adequate reporting from the blockchain, potential buyers can discover the legitimacy of a persons claim of the right to sell. Likewise, the potential buyer can determine the extent (portion) of that right which is held by the seller and held by all owners. In other words, a report would quickly reveal if someone were attempting to sell more than 100% of any right.
Safeguarding Rights
Property rights are often imperiled and occasionally subverted. The most common peril is fraud. The second most common is corruption from hackers. The third is physical destruction of records through acts of war or acts of God.
Physical Threats
Because TWPRR uses a distributed ledger (blockchain technology) copies of the relevant records are stored on computers all over the world, the registry is extremely resilient in the face of physical threats to the records.
Hackers
Thwarting hackers is an ongoing challenge for all blockchains. To minimize this risk, the TWPRR blockchain will fork from another blockchain which already has a proven track record of security from hacks. Additionally, the contracts used will be subject to outside security audits before and after deployment and after any changes are made to the contract which embodies the entries in the blockchain.
Fraud
Defense against fraud builds on defense against hackers. However, the biggest defense against fraudulent transactions will be through restrictions on who is authorized to add transactions to the registry.
Errors
A final threat to property rights is errors in the records. These are unintentional injections of inaccuracies into the records. Protecting against errors may never be 100% successful. However, they can be minimized using proven techniques.
Safeguards
The Registry includes safeguards which:
- Enable lawful individual property actions:
- Individual cryptographic keys, much like a notarized signature on a document, ensure that an individual has lawful claim on the property rights and is authorized to transfer those rights to another.
- Ownership and lessee keys are captured with each transaction.
- Possession of a valid ownership or lessee key is required to enable alteration of the custody of certain rights.
- Prevent fraudulent and unlawful ownership transfers:
- With few exceptions, alterations to property rights cannot occur without the inclusion of an appropriate ownership cryptographic key, to protect against fraudulent transfers.
- Under some circumstances a Sovereign Key can be used to override the owner, lessee, or both keys.
- Registry quality assurance (QA) functions will prevent the registration of fractional rights which cumulatively exceed 100% of the available interest in a right.
- Allow Sovereign property actions:
- Owner and lessee cryptographic keys can be overridden by a Sovereign key when conditions and authorizations are met.
- Sovereign keys are used when courts order transfer of title as the result of some legal action such as foreclosure (tax or other).
- The Registry Manager will retain a Sovereign key to enable the correction of errors.
- County clerks / recorders and similar functionaries outside the USA may also each have a jurisdiction specific Sovereign key
- Prevention of key theft must be addressed
- Replacement of stolen/compromised keys must be addressed
The Case for Keys
A key represents the concept of someone authorized to memorialize a transaction.
Ideally, each Sovereign subscribing to the Registry will have a unique Sovereign Key which allows them to make specific transactions into the Registry. One problem with this approach is it depends upon each Sovereign to keep their respective key secure from unauthorized use. If the key is compromised, the Registry would need to be notified and the key changed.
An alternative is that the Registry manager retains the only key and provides all quality assurance functions to ensure that all updates are legitimate. Unfortunately, although this approach is more secure, it also overlaps functionality and costs with personnel working for sovereigns. This tends to drive up net costs for using the Registry. That conflicts with the expected benefit to sovereigns of reduced operational costs from using the Registry.
Adding Properties
Potentially, anyone with access to the Registry can add properties. To do so, at a minimum, they must enter all the required information for each property. The minimally required information varies depending on the property type. For instance, geographic coordinates are needed and must fall within the area controlled by the respective sovereign for real property.
Adding Owners et al
In contrast with a broad ability to add properties, adding relationships, such as owners and lessees, needs to be closely controlled to thwart fraud and errors.
Conclusions
The Worldwide Property Rights Registry™ has no geographic constraints. It can be used to register rights for properties, owners, and lessees anywhere in the world that has access to the internet. Furthermore, it has no national boundaries. As long as the rights registered are supported by documentation required by sovereigns in the geographic area the property registration applies to, then it can support the maintenance of those rights.
Working with governments across the USA and around the world, TWPRR™ can become an invaluable aid in the supporting of property rights throughout the world. It does not replace the need to register copyrights and trademarks through sovereign authorities, but it can provide a single, worldwide repository where anyone can research and verify those rights.
Works Cited
Bhandari, A. (2019, November 23). BNB Legal. Retrieved from Property Types: https://bnblegal.com/article/types-of-property/
©2024 Universal Real Estate Wealth Protection Solutions, LLC™ All Rights Reserved.
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