Legal Bodies and Regulatory Frameworks

After conducting research and partaking in work experience with a marketing company it has developed my ideas on things I'd need to consider for my business, one thing specifically being the use and regulation of intellectual properties. When assisting in the creation of some corporate videos for my work experience provider Scooterpac I learnt the struggle of getting usable music for corporate videos.

Obviously because of copyright laws I couldn't use music that the company didn't hold the licence for as the song author would be entitled to these things:

As the owner of the work's copyright, they have the sole authority to:

• copy the music
• issue, lend or rent copies to the public
• perform, show or play the music in public
• communicate the music to the public (i.e. broadcasting it via TV, radio, internet etc.)

Because of the music being owned by another company I couldn't simply just use the music within corporate videos, we decided that if we bought one license at an unlimited use rate we could use it on any of the marketing videos in the future so although the licensing was very expensive we could use it for many things thus making it more cost effective. Instead of paying $19 per video for a different selection of music we paid $49 for unlimited uses which in the long run works out a lot cheaper. To get around the same price with single uses you'd only be able to get three licences for the same price. It means that the business has effectively licensed music that can be used for an infinite amount of videos, for each video the value for money goes up and the overall cost per video reduces massively. 

Knowing this I can place it within my own businesses budgetary requirements because if I didn't use an unlimited license I could end up spending way more money than necessary. I also got the opportunity of learning how Scooterpac trademarks their own intellectual property and how important it is to do so, I found out that when you 'trademark' a word you also have to get it registered afterwards which is the difference between a TM mark and an R mark on a specific word, logo or marketing materials. There are also different classes for different trademarks, for example, if I was to trademark a vehicle called the 'SamWagon' I would list it within the trademark vehicles section as I would have no reason to stop a company in the kitchen appliances section who'd also named their cooker a 'SamWagon' as it would be an entirely different product. If a company did try to call their vehicle a 'SamWagon' after my company trademarked I could take legal action and sue them. 

After learning this I learnt how essential it is to make sure you've checked item/character and logo/business-names as if not you can end up in a situation where another company who owns the trademark can then themselves take legal action against you.