Tackling IP complexities in the age of streaming

Rise of the sub­scrip­tion econ­o­my, fuelled by new stream­ing ser­vices across books, music, games, TV and film, has mul­ti­plied the com­plex­i­ties fac­ing pub­lish­ers when it comes to intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty (IP) rights and how authors and artists get paid for their work.

Just like the music, gam­ing and film indus­tries have already been dras­ti­cal­ly influ­enced by stream­ing, led by the pop­u­lar­i­ty of Spo­ti­fy and Net­flix, book pub­lish­ing is head­ing in a com­pa­ra­ble direc­tion through ebook sub­scrip­tion ser­vices such as Kin­dle Unlim­it­ed.

Stream­ing has shift­ed music’s key mon­eti­sa­tion mod­el from the phys­i­cal dis­tri­b­u­tion of albums to stream­ing roy­al­ties on indi­vid­ual songs and the book world is fac­ing sim­i­lar dis­rup­tions as sub­scrip­tions rip up the rules on how authors are con­tract­ed and paid.

A move towards more time-based con­tracts, where­by the dis­trib­u­tors own the rights on a work for only a set peri­od of time, cre­ates fur­ther com­plex­i­ty around IP. And in the midst of this, if a book leads to a movie or musi­cal, or in some cas­es a whole lot more com­mer­cial­i­sa­tion, who is keep­ing up with who should be paid for what and when?

Our role is to sup­port com­plex­i­ty in the world of IP

“The deals, the con­tracts, how works are licensed, how par­ties are paid, the num­ber of par­ties that get paid and con­tribute to work, the glob­al­i­sa­tion of the mar­ket, the back­lash from artists and authors who want to be paid more, all this is adding an incred­i­ble amount of com­plex­i­ty to IP in the stream­ing age,” says Scott Win­ner, chief exec­u­tive of Ingen­ta, an Oxford-based provider of con­tent ser­vices for the pub­lish­ing indus­try.

“It seems sim­ple, but in exe­cu­tion it’s very com­plex. I write a book and you license it from me, so you can dis­trib­ute and sell that book and I get pay­ments based on what we agree in our con­tract. But what if you’re doing that for 1,000 dif­fer­ent peo­ple with slight­ly dif­fer­ent agree­ments every time? That’s hard. Com­pa­nies end up with lots of spread­sheets with dif­fer­ent for­mu­las because there are 15 dif­fer­ent types of con­tract.”

Pelo­ton, the high-tech exer­cise bike that enables users to join streamed spin­ning class­es, is cur­rent­ly fac­ing a $300-mil­lion law­suit from music pub­lish­ers that claim it dis­trib­uted their songs with­out the cor­rect licens­ing. The sheer scale of the dam­ages that Pelo­ton could face demon­strates the risks of ignor­ing the com­plex­i­ties of IP in the dig­i­tal age.

Ingen­ta solves these unique prob­lems with robust solu­tions for IP man­age­ment. Its com­mer­cial plat­form man­ages the con­tracts, rights and roy­al­ties for some of the largest glob­al book pub­lish­ers. The tech­nol­o­gy is media agnos­tic, enhances the track­ing of own­er­ship from con­tract to pay­ment through meta­da­ta best prac­tices and enables easy dis­cov­ery of under­utilised rights to high­light new oppor­tu­ni­ties to mon­e­tise IP.

Last year Ingen­ta also launched its first ded­i­cat­ed prod­uct for the music indus­try and is also work­ing with the gam­ing indus­tries. The sys­tem pro­vides music pub­lish­ers with a com­pre­hen­sive and con­sis­tent resource for cre­at­ing and man­ag­ing music rights con­tracts and the var­i­ous ways in which they can be utilised. Roy­al­ties are reli­ably cal­cu­lat­ed based on IP usage across any for­mat, includ­ing mechan­i­cal, pub­lic per­for­mance, print and syn­chro­ni­sa­tion roy­al­ties.

“Our role is to sup­port com­plex­i­ty in the world of IP,” says Win­ner. “We have focused on high­ly con­fig­urable, rules-dri­ven sys­tems, so we can change them with­out chang­ing the soft­ware, and we’re con­stant­ly work­ing on adding new mod­ules to keep up with new devel­op­ments. We use an end-to-end approach, from the con­tracts stage right through to the pay­ments, ensur­ing it all flows from a data per­spec­tive.

“It’s easy for large pub­lish­ers to get into a mode where they lack stan­dard­i­s­a­tion around their con­tracts, leav­ing holes and gaps in how they process pay­ments. They might have 15 peo­ple nego­ti­at­ing con­tracts at any giv­en time, so we allow them to enforce stan­dards of review, con­tract struc­tures and claus­es. We ensure com­pli­ance and give pub­lish­ers the con­fi­dence to embrace the excit­ing new busi­ness mod­els and oppor­tu­ni­ties in these indus­tries.”

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it ingenta.com