Protect Your Prompts: Protocols for IP Protection in LLM Applications
This addresses the issue of economic non-excludability for prompt engineers, potentially supporting an open market, but it is incremental as it builds on existing IP concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of protecting prompts as intellectual property in large language model applications to enable a competitive market, proposing two protocols to elevate their status and confirm rights for prompt engineers.
With the rapid adoption of AI in the form of large language models (LLMs), the potential value of carefully engineered prompts has become significant. However, to realize this potential, prompts should be tradable on an open market. Since prompts are, at present, generally economically non-excludable, by virtue of their nature as text, no general competitive market has yet been established. This note discusses two protocols intended to provide protection of prompts, elevating their status as intellectual property, thus confirming the intellectual property rights of prompt engineers, and potentially supporting the flourishing of an open market for LLM prompts.