This Spring
I attended a seminar at the Norwegian Industrial Property Office. The seminar
was aimed towards film and TV-production. It hosted a range of speakers within
the fields of production, distribution and law. The
World Intellectual Property Rights Day is a worldwide event and this year’s
theme was “Movies – A Global Passion.” Some of the presentations can be seen on Youtube. Here’s a breakdown of the speakers and their presentations:
Per A. Foss, Director General, Norwegian
Industrial Property Office (NIPO)
He has a solid academic research career and has worked with business
development and licensing before taking up his role at NIPO in 2012. Foss
talked about NIPO’s work in general and highlighted their increasing interest
in assisting the creative industries, as this is a sector in growth. As a creative
practitioner in the Kingdom of Norway having this solid backing and desire to
connect from an organisation like NIPO is reassuring. From the mingling after
the event it was also clear that NIPO is interested in opportunities to connect
with institutions in Higher Education, to help educate prospective creative
practitioners. This could include taking part in events, helping with
developing curricula and more.
· Taking an idea through to a product
for visual media.
· What can be patented and what
cannot? (with examples of current shows that have fed of each other’s ideas).
· How to work well with writers and
book authors in turning their products into films.
· How the film and TV-industries have
changed over the last decade and how this should affect your approach to
production.
· Where money currently is moving and
not moving within the industries.
· Effective pitching.
Hedvig Bengtson,
Senior Adviser, Norwegian Industrial Property Office (NIPO)
Hedvig is a
Senior Legal Advisor at the Norwegian IndustrialProperty Office. Hedvig provided an overview over various
actions that are being taken to fight piracy internationally. Many of the same
organisations that work with protecting physical copyright infringements also
work with digital infringements. Infringements of copyright to a physical
product and a digital product have a lot in common even though they are
fundamentally different in nature. Copied digital products are hard to track.
Some organisations
working for protection of digital property rights:
· World Intellectual Property
Organization, WIPO (UN). The webpage is a good resource on legal and
political matters, and co-operations being done in the area of intellectual
property rights
· Norway’s premier University, the Norwegian University
of Science and Technology (NTNU) has recently established Norwegian Academy for Intellectual Property
· 4 official
organizations working together in Norway:
o
There is a lot of information spread around the web. A new web-page will
be launched towards the end of 2014. The webpage will provide one location for
important information
General:
· Trend: “Piracy kills music” –this type of campaign has
not been efficient [little wonder! An entire culture industry in effect
criminalizing a whole generation it wishes to benefit financially from! =my
comment=]. Increasingly one is trying to provide a positive angle!
· UK is good at providing good information about where
to legally download (The Content
Map)
· Music
Inc. is a music management app where you can see how much revenue is lost
from an artist to piracy
· The Norwegian Industrial Property Office has developed
an app where you can search for trademarks, company names and internet domains
· EU completed a study of how much regular people knew
about intellectual property rights
o
10% of the
population commits 74% of the offences against intellectual property rights
(IPR). These are typically aged 15 to 25 years old
o
IPR-intensive
industries provides ¼ of the employment and ⅓ of the economic production inside
the EU
Simon Strumse, Filmgrail
Filmgrail
is a newly launched app and web-page to help you search for new films to watch
in a legal way. Filmgrail is aiming to make people watch more films and not
just the same blockbusters over and over. With their simple user-interface they
make information about films available to you to help with making quick and
informed decisions. The first stage has been an app developed with emphasis on
the Norwegian marked, but within a short while they will cover the whole world.
The system can be implemented in decoders and TVs. I have mentioned Filmgrail
and Simon in a previous blog post.
From the
presentation:
· The old model: First viewing (TV)/
Cinema (Film) -> DVD is still the most profitable. But within a few years
streaming will take over
· 95% of film revenue comes from about
5% of all films that have been made
· Consumer decisions are based on
psychology. User-friendliness is more important to the consumer than law
· Popcorn Time is an illegal
Argentinian web-service that has collected a huge catalogue of TV and Film in
one place (torrents played through a very good interface). It is very user friendly
and supposedly better than Netflix. It has no zone restrictions. This should be
a wake-up call to the film industry, why are they not doing the same?
David Smith, Norway Communicates & Lillehammer Foundation
for the Arts (LFA)
· A lot of culture production is happening in Norway,
but not much is known abroad
· Recent developments at Lillehammer
University College
· The Royal Norwegian Ministry
of Trade, Industry and Fisheries has an emphasis on internationalization:
-> Smith asks the question, what can we do to get Norway
to open up to international culture?
[My view is that this question should be asked
in reverse, how can we get Norwegian culture into the world? I also believe
this is much more in line with the other work Smith is doing, and that there is
a lot of unexplored commercial gains in exporting a previously globally unknown
culture. As a resident of Singapore and the UK for a many years I know the
cultural curiosity we are met with as ex-pats. I also believe that a
1000-year-old Kingdom should allow itself to explore more of its
millennial-long history than just the last few decades—which is a topic for
another time.]
· Also mentioning: Vision
Norway 2030 [for more click link],
Norway Exports, The
Rise of the Creative Class [review],
talking about Norwegian culture as an ‘experience economy,’ and the concept
behind Cultural Crossroads.
· “When you find the essence of culture, everyone can
relate to it.”
=Steven Van
Zandt=
Shout
Shout out also to Bernd Otto Ewald
for an interesting conversation about Norwegian tourism after lunch! Ewald is a Senior Adviser at the Royal Norwegian Ministry
of Trade, Industry and Fisheries.
 |
| Norway—culture to capitalize from? Photo: Harald Haltvik |
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