Minding the Idea Factory: Intellectual Property in the Digital Age

Continued

Now Oracle has partnered with market-leading IP management (IPM) software vendor Sophoi, Inc., to offer complex rights management rolled up into a dashboard view that includes complete integration with Oracle Financials as well as deep auditing and reporting capabilities. Oracle Financials combined with Sophoi iPLS, running on an Oracle Fusion–certified tech stack comprising Oracle Database and Oracle Fusion Middleware is an end-to-end IP management solution for the media-and-entertainment industry that is unparalleled in the market.

The industry agrees. "We were very impressed with the breadth of functionality, the incorporation of industry business practices and processes, and the leading-edge technological architecture of Sophoi's iPLS product suite," says the CIO of a major motion picture studio.

An Oracle/Sophoi enterprise-class solution seamlessly manages this complex and evolving value chain. The vice president of IT for another major motion picture studio agrees: "Sophoi's iPLS 3.0 will enable us to identify and organize our television rights, locate and license the rights to our assets, and streamline our overall intellectual property management and licensing process."

Making It Real

Let's say a pre-eminent media-and-entertainment company owns the "intangible" idea of Spiderman. It might license out partial rights to the character to a variety of entities: a movie studio; a comic book company; a gaming company; and a range of manufacturing companies that will slap some choice images onto lunch boxes, T-shirts, decals, and all manner of children's toys. You can see just how complicated tracking the associated rights for all this activity might be. And although intellectual property management affects primarily the media-and-entertainment sector, the same challenges face the pharmaceutical, high-technology, biotechnology, and medical industries. And as more companies offshore critical business functions, IP challenges continue to multiply.

The scope is huge, the potential impact on a company's profitability profound. And the cold, hard truth is that without a comprehensive end-to-end IPM software solution, most organizations can't even dream of optimally exploiting their IP content assets.

The 19th century was the Industrial Age, the 20th the Information Age. All signs indicate that the 21st century may well come to be known as the Age of Content Production, Acquisition, and Aggregation. And if businesses with IP holdings can't intelligently track the fecundity of those assets at a granular level, they would be wise to remedy this shortcoming sooner rather than later or, in the words of a porcine and much beloved American IP content asset: "That's all, folks."

Gartner source:
Predicts 2007: The Media Industry Confronts the Challenge of Digital Distribution by Van L. Baker, Allen Weiner, Andrew Frank. Gartner Industry Research, December 7, 2006, ID Number G00144868.

For more information, see www.sophoi.com and www.oracle.com/industries/media-entertainment.