Intellectual Property / Copyright
Intellectual property assets represent for most organizations and individuals their main competitive advantage. In this sense, protecting and ensuring respect for them are some of the actions needed to collect the due profit as the creator/owner of those titles.
Copyright law and the author’s rights system
When it comes to art, two main systems exist in the world to protect such assets: copyright law and the author’s rights system. The first mentioned, used in anglo-saxon countries like the UK, USA, Australia, New Zealand. The latter, more spread, goes from continental Europe to Latin-America and some African and Asian countries.
The existence of international agreements/conventions and international commerce cause these two legal frames to interact and add complexity and advantages depending on the situations in cause.
The digital era, governing a huge part of commercial activities in the world, adds too, both great new uses for intellectual property. But it also challenges its control as wide usage of intellectual property can result in generation of profit, not necessarily by the rightful person.
No surprise market actors like Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) have recently added to their policies both great care on ensuring respect to trademark and copyrighted work but also the possibility for rightful owners to attach to their commerce accounts domain names and images to trace any non-authorized usage of copyrighted work.
When it comes to art like music, graphic art or audiovisuals, the reach of intellectual property is ruled by the two previous legal systems and the formalities to protect such works has not changed much since early days.
What has greatly changed, on the other hand, is the way to reach the public and the means to make art accessible to the masses. Going from vinyl records to streaming, printing material to NFTs or any other digital representation of graphic and audiovisual art.
Trademarks
In this sense, when it comes to trademarks, a copy of a valid trademark title can be uploaded directly on Meta’s account to prove owning the rights. This allows respect, for example, of territoriality, classification under Nice standards and signs usually used to promote or distinguish products and services in the market.
Finally, image recognition, blockchain, metadata and other technologies are in consequence adding certainty to track all uses of assets in the digital domain. An area that not long ago seemed like nobody’s land due to its vast reach.
Proper licensing or proportional remuneration to the parts involved in the creation/production of the art are some points to consider when using protected works.
The most important thing, as noted from the beginning, is to comply with formalities and initial conditions to reach legal protection. Then, taking the actions to ensure proper tracking of respect of such rights.
If you need help on this domain, please feel free to contact me.
Consultory price €160/hr.