Avoiding The Dangers Of Accidental Infrigement
Most corporations now insist on retaining the copyright and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) to assets they have commissioned. Despite this, copyright and IPR provides headaches for many reasons, these are just a few:
- If the company acquires or merges with another firm, IPR may not be transferable to the parent group after the transaction is complete – this depends on the terms of the asset’s licence.
- Assets commissioned prior an initiative to retain copyright and/or IPR will still be subject previous agreements, which may include territorial or other usage restrictions.
- Popular, single-payment licences, such as royalty-free, may not be easily extendable over multiple subsidiaries (even if shares are owned by a single holding company).
- There may be additional complications such as property licences where the owners of a building or structure insist on being paid royalties and/or having the right to veto usage in certain contexts.
- Third party copyright might also require consideration. For example if the composition of a video or image contains a highly prominent product, screenshot, or other intellectual property, there is the risk that the owner may request royalties or veto it’s usage - even though the asset was not directly originated by them.
The area of copyright compliance is usually too complex to be easily rationalised into a form based approach that can be represented on a brand asset management system. A more pragmatic method is to determine which assets have no copyright restrictions and which that do using a flowchart based workflow as shown below:
Those that claim to have a solution that will manage compliance in a fully ‘hands off’ fashion as probably lack of genuine experience of dealing with the complexities of IPR.
Vendors of brand asset management solutions with experience of working with Marcomms departments will understand the complexities of commercial copyright and IPR management across an organisation and will be able to demonstrate digital asset management features designed to accommodate them.