Following news of the paper’s publication alongside the ICOMP Council meeting earlier this month, Monday evening marked the launch of the latest ICOMP White Paper on intellectual property rights (IPR) entitled Intellectual Property On The Internet: The Search For Sustainable Business Practices.
The event, which took place at Copyright House consisted of a cross-industry panel discussion involving David Wood, Andrew Orlowski, Executive Editor of The Register, Author Nick Harkaway, Frances Lowe, Regulatory and Corporate Affairs Director at PRS for Music and Premier League spokesman Tim Vine, following a keynote by chairman of the PRS, Ellis Rich. The event was also well-atteneded by authors, academics, trade organisations and media owners.
Up for debate was the extent to which:
a) ’social contracts’ - agreements between an organisation and the individual to respect IP - were effective as part of industry best practice
b) fines or settlement out of court for IP infrigement risked being relagated to being a mere ‘operating cost’, where companies had the resources to make greater profit from the data gathered as a result, and
c) the role that metadata would play in preserving our analogue legacy in digital form, including orphan works.
A series of vox-pop interviews, featuring the panellists that explored the measures recommended to protect intellectual property online, the damaging impact of ‘institutional’ IP mis-use by larger players in the online marketplace, together with highlights of the event will be available on video soon.
We conducted a series of ‘vox pop’ interviews in which we asked about their views regarding protecting intellectual property online. They were also questioned regarding the role of market dominance in IP mis-use.