U.S. Patent 11146381 was awarded to Adobe Inc. on October 12, 2021 and is entitled “Traceability of edits to digital documents via distributed ledgers.” The first named inventor is Gavin Stuart Peter Miller of Los Altos, CA. The abstract contains an overview of the patent disclosure:

Embodiments provide traceability of edits to a document, i.e., a verifiable and immutable provenance chain for the document. Systems and methods enable traceability of edits, by encoding, for states of the document, a fingerprint (e.g., a cryptographic hash of the document’s contents) and an edit history within a block written to a distributed ledger (e.g., a blockchain). The ledger is maintained via a self-organizing peer-to-peer distributed ledger network. Once added to the ledger, the contents of a block (e.g., the document’s fingerprint and edit history) are immutable and the integrity of the edit history encoded in the ledger is secure. The algorithm that generates the fingerprint is sensitive to edits of the document. The non-corruptible fingerprint encoded in the ledger is employable to detect any edits that are not included in the encoded edit history and/or inconsistent with a currently available version of the document. Link to Full Patent

This blockchain patent was originally filed on November 16, 2018  as U.S. Patent Application 16/193773 at the United Stated Patent and Trademark Office. The application was them awarded a patent grant and published as U.S. Patent 11146381. The primary examiner was Christopher A Revak.

Adobe Inc., who is the original assignee of this patent, has at least 5213 total granted patents in the United States as of the date of this article. This blockchain patent has been cited 0 times by other U.S. patents according to our law firm research, and can be considered an innovative patent in the field of cryptocurrency and blockchain.

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