Minding the Idea Factory: Intellectual Property in the Digital Age
How do you know who's using your IP when it's instantly available around the world?
by Elizabeth L. Morgan, September 2007
"Intellectual property is the oil of the 21st century," Mark Getty, grandson of oil magnate J. Paul Getty, said in an interview with The Economist in 2000. At the time, it was a relatively provocative claim. But given that 60 to 70 percent of the NYSE's top 100 companies now deal almost exclusively in intangible assets, it's a statement that has taken on the aura of prophecy.
Creating technical solutions for managing the intricacies—and idiosyncrasies—of intellectual property assets is no small task, particularly for the media-and-entertainment sector, where content assets are sliced and diced with piranha-like intensity and an asset can be anything from a full-length feature film to a five-second Linkin Park sample morphed to the staccato bleeps of a cell ring tone. Maximizing those assets is becoming an increasingly complex—and critical—part of the industry that information technology is starting to improve.
Breaking It Down
Just how complicated is the lifecycle of a media-and-entertainment IP content asset? Let's take a spin through a generic, relatively straightforward example—ignoring for the moment that "straightforward" is rarely the nature of the beast in what is typically an exception-driven industry.
It begins with an idea—and even at this early stage, rights management issues are already in play. Who originated the idea? Who owns the idea? Is it written down? Can ownership be proven? "Even before content creation is initiated," says Christy Lally, business development director for Media and Entertainment for Oracle EMEA, "IP metadata must be closely tracked, so that ownership is crystal-clear and the trail is thoroughly documented." Otherwise an organization risks the kind of legal troubles that result from multiple claims of idea origination.
Once authorship and ownership are established, content can be commissioned—with myriad attendant terms and conditions, all of which must be closely documented. When the finished product is ready to rock-and-roll, metadata accurately and exhaustively classifying the content must be captured in a rights repository, so that the asset can be managed, tracked, and analyzed in context with the other content owned or licensed by the enterprise. Rights information held in a rights database defines how the asset can be used—that is, in which territory, language, format, and so on—and what restrictions apply. It also captures and defines the royalty terms attaching to each asset.
