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Creative Intellectual Property
Dr. Keith Nurse & Alicia Nicholls Intellectual property is a key area for the monetization and commercialization of creative products and services. Digitization has accelerated this process. Copyright protection is the form of IP rights protection most used to protect creative products. Earnings from copyright include royalties, licensing and digital rights management. Creative intellectual property is rising in importance to the Caribbean economy as exempli?ed by the ?ndings of the WIPO country study on Jamaica which revealed that the copyright industries contributed 4.8% of Jamaica’s gross domestic product (GDP) while employing 32,032 persons or 3.03% of its population. In CARIFORUM, only 61% of countries include data in their national balance of payments on royalties. The most reliable source of data comes from the royalty in?ows and out?ows collected by the region’s collective management organizations, several of which are members of Caribbean Copyright Link (see Box 1).
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Box 1: Caribbean Copyright Link Caribbean Copyright Link is a regional umbrella association made up of collection management societies in the Caribbean. Founded in 2000, the principal aim of CCL is to place regional authors, composers and publishers in a better position to collect royalties from international markets. CCL itself does not collect royalties. This is done by its member societies. However, the CCL secretariat functions primarily to reduce costs and to assist member organisations with the sharing of data and the management of works. To this effect, CCL operates and monitors a centralised database. The registered of?ce is located in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. The four founding members of CCL were the Copyright Organisation of Trinidad and Tobago (COTT), the Copyright Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers Incorporated (COSCAP) in Barbados, the Jamaican Association of Composers, Authors and Publishers Limited (JACAP) in Jamaica and the Eastern Caribbean Copyright Organization for Music Rights Incorporated (ECCO). Since then, its membership has expanded to include the Agencia Cubana de Derecho de Autor Musical (ACDAM), Stichting Auteursrechten Suriname (SASUR), the Belize Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (BSCAP),the Jamaica Music Society (JAMMS) and the Jamaican Copyright Licensing Agency (JAMCOPY). Membership in CCL Founding territories reached 5,344 in 2008.
Source: Of?cial website of Caribbean Copyright Link www.cc-link.net. Volume 3 July - September 2011 www.creativeindustriesexchange.com
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