Tracking IP Across the Creative Technologies project (TRI-PACT)

The 'Tracking IP Across the Creative Technologies' project (TRI-PACT) aims to advance the research agenda and stimulate creative and strategic thinking around the management, protection, sharing, access, use and reuse of Intellectual Property (IP) within and across the technology-rich creative domains of Film, Broadcast and Games.

Near-universal digitization of creative media combined with ubiquitous high-bandwidth internet access has transformed media consumption behaviours, patterns and expectation. The ever-increasing convergence in form between film, broadcast and computer games mean that audiences can simultaneously and seamlessly engage with all three on multiple devices. Although there is some reuse of resources and content across these domains (for example the CGI that is generated in films can then be used by the games industry), single-media IP frameworks and licensing strategies have remained largely in-place, which has restricted the wider sharing of the rich materials generated by these industries with their audiences, other practitioners, researchers and educationalists in this new and converged landscape.

This shifting context requires a convergence in thinking about how to manage and protect IP to facilitate cross-media sharing, access, use and reuse. The problem is compounded by the fact that the complexities of digital audiovisual content are at such a level, that potentially every frame of film, video or CGI, individual element of a set, phrase of a script or CGI character, could potentially have a different set of licensing and IP issues attributed to it. In current and emerging digital asset management technologies, such legal, contractual and rights data can be generated within the production cycle and recorded within the metadata that accompanies each piece of content, but access to this by external stakeholders is limited; contractual rights, privacy, legal implications are all hidden from view, and there is a lack of transparency and clarity around how such materials can be discovered, accessed, used and reused by different audience constituencies.

The TRI-PACT project draws together a group of key stakeholders (practitioners, researchers, educationalists and industry partners) to rethink and re-imagine current IP structures within Film, Broadcast and Games production toward a new enabling model of IP management and protection that facilitates cross-media sharing, access, use and reuse. Each domain has its own unique set of challenges, with divergent practices and structures whilst also sharing many commonalities. By bringing together key representatives of these three fields, the project will facilitate knowledge exchange, evolve shared understandings of IP, develop requirements case studies through cross-domain dialogue and explore novel approaches to IP management, through technical sketches which extend current and emerging digital asset management technologies to incorporate explicit, detailed modelling of IP.

The key deliverables from the project will be a set of guidelines to support stakeholders wishing to engage with the approach in their IP management practice and a shared roadmap towards more substantive professional and technical integration and support, augmented by the case studies and associate technical sketches to provide a more detailed exposition of the main principles of the approach.

TRI-PACT directly benefits from the work of the AHRC-funded cross-disciplinary 'Deep Film Access Project' (DFAP), which explores how digital assets and associated metadata can be mapped, organized and interlinked to enable richer and enhanced appreciation and understandings of the materials generated by film production and its concomitant work processes. TRI-PACT partners include researchers working internationally across Film, Broadcast and Game with a specific interest in IP. Commercial and cultural partners from Film, Broadcast and Games include BFI, BBC and UKIE

The core impact, running through the entire project, is the removal of the barriers to access and reuse of assets for producers, and audiences, of film, broadcast and games content of all types and scale, through a more effective and enabling cross-media IP framework.
The ambitions in delivering the project are realistic and we have considered two approaches - to engagement - research-led and user-led. These two approaches will work together to maximise impact and ensure uptake occurs within a project in which the resources (staff and non-staff costs) are capped at £50,000. For this reason, the individual pathways (described in 'Pathways to Impact') are designed to improve the chances of the research fulfilling its potential impact(s) upon the future direction of content management for games, film, television, online and other media platforms. Examples of such potential impact include:
- Advancement of more effective ways of interrogating the origins and potential of latent intellectual property while protecting the rights of the IP creators and owners to ensure they are properly compensated and rewarded, irrespective of how their original IP is adapted and used across different media. A wider group of beneficiaries include policymakers or others interested in the governance of IP management.
- Enhancing relationships between organisations involved in the development of more accessible digital assets in the production of films, television and games, designed for myriad platforms (e.g. mobile devices) which will lead to more productive and enriched experiences for those involved in developing content and users who enjoy accessing the content via platforms of their choice.
- New models and frameworks for IP developed from the collaborative research methodology - combining the skills and knowledge through cross-disciplinary working between film scholars, media academics, computer scientists, visual media experts, filmmakers, broadcasters, games producers and archive / curation specialists. The long-term aim is to develop these models further toward a cross-media approach in order to reach new audiences, and to apply them as new means by which to make accessible the vast range and volume of datasets and metadata associated with film, broadcast and games in order to enrich the experience for the general public.
- Enriching the data available to researchers, content creators, archivists, curators, scholars and those interested in films, broadcast and games (viewers, fans, critics) by establishing a new framework of IP and methodology for making accessible IP data.
- Encouraging academic disciplines to work together - combining traditional research methodologies with practice-based approaches, associated with computer science with those derived from knowledge, experience and expertise in the arts and humanities. The combination of skills between the PI and Co-Is will act as an example case study during the dissemination of research results activities (see Case for Support and Pathways to Impact) - as a means of starting to have an impact - particularly within HE Arts-led projects that bring in advanced skills and expertise from other disciplines to improve research design, methodology and results.
- The long-term aim is to encourage content creators, content managers, filmmakers, broadcasters, game designers, game companies, to adopt a culture of thinking about the datasets as much as the visual assets from the films they create and to work with those who will be responsible for curating them (Museums, content producers, universities, broadcasters and studios).
- A much longer-term potential impact is to prove the value and transferability of the research methodology and application of the research results - specifically the new IP model - to other areas of arts and culture. For example, the principles of this research project could be equally applied to digital arts, music production and performing arts.