Working as a creative freelancer or contractor can pose difficulties when it comes to protecting your intellectual property, but all that could change soon.
That’s because firms will soon be given opportunities to access greater information about ownership rights and copyright licences, thanks to a new initiative announced by Lord Younger, the intellectual property minister. Lord Younger says that he’s sinking a massive £150,000 investment into a new web portal that will make it loads easier for anyone working in a creative industry to safeguard their ideas from either accidental or purposeful infringement.
This new system has been long in the making, as it was originally suggested in a 2011 review by professor Ian Hargreaves, who posited that providing more complete access to information regarding copyright law could benefit the economy to the point where an additional £2.2 billion could be harvested from the economy by the end of the decade.
For firms with a less than perfect understanding of how copyright law works, I think his could be a serious boon in reducing the damage that plagiarism and the use of unattributed content for financial gain. Original content is king in the creative industries, and the kind of churn you can experience with content providers taking barely modified content from others and passing it off on their own can be a very serious problem; this new website could go far to educate people in order to eliminate this kind of behaviour.
On the other hand, many less than reputable firms are more than willing to nick the original creative content put out there either by rival companies or by contract workers, so this website might not do much to dissuade this activity after all. For what it’s worth, there’ll be fewer excuses to be heard when firms like these are caught red-handed in ripping off the hard work of content creators, and though copyright laws won’t be changing any time soon, Lord Younger’s website should still be some sort of help; it certainly can’t possibly make matters any worse, can it?
