The creative industries including design, digital media & convergence, and service innovation disciplines, are responsible for a significant amount of Intellectual property value-generation for industry. In a speech to business leaders David Cameron announced the IP system review and stated "we are reviewing our IP laws, to see if we can make them fit for the internet age."
The six-month review aims to identify barriers to growth within the IP framework, which consists of the rules and regulations covering how IP is created, used and protected in UK. It will particularly focus on how the IP system can be improved to help the new business models arising from the digital age.
"The internet has fundamentally changed the business landscape. Some sectors, such as the creative industries, have been transformed by it. The intellectual property framework must keep pace," said Baroness Wilcox, IP Minister.
"An IP system created in the era of paper and pen may not fit the age of broadband and satellites. We must ensure it meets the needs of the digital age. The future of the economy lies in the highly skilled, technology sectors. For many of those companies their intellectual property is their most valuable asset.
We must ensure the intellectual property system helps not hinders those companies. This review will look at what changes can be made to our intellectual property system to ensure it helps firms grow."
The review is welcomed by new technology start-up Creative Barcode, formed by a co-creation team of British Design Innovation members, the UK's leading trade body for industrial, service design and innovation, in September 2010.
Creative Barcode is a new IPR open-protection system developed for creative industries to enable the protection of their work through the use of a digital barcodes applied to all project related documents and images to denote ownership and permission based usage.
IP generation activities in professional creative industry disciplines manifest in three distinct areas.
The first is IP generated or arising from contracts commissioned to creative consultancies from the largest corporate firms down to the smallest start-ups.
The second is individual designers and design firms who develop their own new products, services and brands to bring to market through licensing and co-creation deals with route to market partners.
And the third is the digital convergence, content, App, platform, new media and software developers utilizing new technologies in innovative ways.
"The role of the creative industries in the development of IP is often misunderstood or over-looked by industry at large," commented Maxine Horn, Creative Barcode CEO. "Yet they are one of the most important contributors to IP generation."