Well quite a bit. Possibly as much as a
few billion dollars to owners of intellectual properties, so please bear with
me on this.
Using different terminologies makes it
difficult to equate two properties or rights. Indeed, they may have different
meanings, especially when moving between jurisdictions. And as difficult as
they are for humans to codify, it becomes an even greater issue when you ask
computers to deal with the tautology.
This is one of the major reasons why it
has taken so long to introduce efficient marketplaces for rights, in our view.
But for the past three years at Rights Tracker we've had a project aimed at
tackling this.
You can break the issues down into two:
let's call them IP Types and Metadata.
Very often a property is made up of a
collection of rights and assets and these can be arranged in a hierarchy - this
is what we call IP Types.
For example, you may have a Brand such
as Harry Potter, this then has Books, the Books have Versions (e.g. for
different languages). In turn these IP Types can have Assets such as Chapters,
Illustrations and Photographs.
Then consider a TV programme where you
may have Title, Versions, Series, Episode, with the Episode made up of multiple
Video, Image, Music and Document assets.
We're currently building a rights
management system for a major pharma company, and here the IP Types are even
more extensive with IP Types such as Graphs.
Code snippets, electronic components,
drug ingredients are all potential IP Types.
Now you can start to realize the
implications of IP Type management, which us why we have spent so much time,
effort and brain power addressing this area.
Our resulting project to manage and
codify this has resulted in the following developments.
First of all, we create an IP Type and
this has fixed or variable Properties. Then, you can Label this (film or movie,
for example) and place it in a Hierarchy, defining its Relationships with other
IP Types.
Another dimension to this is that every
IP Type has its own metadata, and there is very little standardization of this
even within industries, although the rise of XML has seen this situation
improve.
Our approach is to enable standardized
metadata schema to be used, using a minimum data set, e.g. Movie Title, Movie
Description, Movie Issue Date, Tags and then to make this extensible.
This keeps the data portable and
interchangeable.
We've now introduced the above concepts
to our rights and asset management platform, Assetry. This means that we can
not only enable any specific IP Type model, but can also make this
interchangeable and matchable between organizations. This in turn has the huge
benefit of enabling us to not only help our customers to deliver content more
effectively, as we do for the Press Association and their daily news video
feeds, for example, but also to enable trading in these properties in real
time.
This may all sound esoteric, but we
believe that the results will facilitate new money making and money saving
opportunities to anyone involved in managing intellectual property.
Get in touch with us if you'd like to
hear more.