To successfully licence assets, you need to own rights that can be licensed (otherwise a would-be licensee doesn’t need a licence). Intellectual property and assets, such as trade marks, designs, copyright works and patents, are the “pegs” on which licences can hang. Disputes can arise over what rights are included in a licence and whether or not rights created after the licence is entered into are included or not. As a licensor, to narrow the scope of disputes, you need to identify, and be able to establish ownership of, all the rights you want to licence. And you need to be able to do this everywhere where you want to grant a licence, territory by territory.
At The Victor, we use Etched® intellectual asset management tool to ensure licences are as robust and valuable as possible by tokenising the assets you want to licence. As long as you have a trade mark registration in the territory where you want to appoint someone as your licensee, you can refer that registration (or to those registrations if more than one) in the licence, but copyright is not territorial in the same way and usually it is unregistered. Therefore, it needs careful management. Copyright comes into being in the country where the work is created and international protection comes about by virtue of an international convention, whereby member countries recognise each other’s copyright. The trans-national nature of the blockchain means that Etched® copyright tokens can be created in your home territory, where the copyright comes into existence, and referred to in licences around the globe.
Our Intellectual Asset Management Team uses Etched® to proactively help you capture knowledge and digitally secure evidence of any kind that may be vital to you in the management of your intellectual assets. The kind of things that can be protected include any asset within your business, and evidence such as the following:
