Hybrid Governance of Intellectual Property in the Digital Age: Aligning Law, Platforms, AI, and Blockchain for Effective Protection

Abstract

Accelerated digitalisation is reshaping how intellectual property is created, exploited, and protected, while exposing the limits of classical doctrines, especially territoriality and conventional enforcement models. Platform markets, data-intensive business models, AI-enabled replication, and distributed technologies amplify cross-border circulation of protected subject matter and increase the evidentiary and cybersecurity burdens placed on rights holders and institutions. The study aims to develop a governance-oriented model of IP protection in the digital environment that integrates legal harmonisation, platform accountability, cybersecurity safeguards, and the conditional use of emerging technologies such as blockchain, smart contracts, and AI-enabled detection. The article applies formal-legal and comparative analysis of European and international instruments, complemented by system-structural mapping of the IP lifecycle to connect platform and AI vulnerabilities with governance controls such as authentication, auditability, interoperability, and remedies.Secondary statistics are used to contextualise scale and enforcement pressure. The results show that the most destabilising effect of digitisation is institutional: disputes increasingly depend on evidence quality, platform procedures, and security posture rather than on doctrinal entitlement alone. Blockchain contributes most reliably when treated as evidentiary and administrative infrastructure, because timestamping and hashing support integrity markers but do not prove authorship or lawful entitlement without identity, provenance, and reproducible verification.NFTs are not rights-transfer mechanisms absent explicit licensing or assignment terms. Effective digital-age IP protection requires a hybrid governance model combining procedural clarity, institution-building, cybersecurity maturity, and carefully scoped technology deployment. Future studies should test admissibility pathways for blockchain-supported evidence, evaluate interoperability designs for registries and platforms, and measure error and remedy performance in automated enforcement pipelines.