Hello and welcome to my blog on Intellectual Properties! Here I will undergo a journey to discover and evaluate some of the newest and predominant Film and TV franchises, whilst analysing the hype surrounding them. But my underlying question for this blog is this: What makes an IP successful? Is it their box office figures? Is it the ability to generate a fanbase? Is it the number of fancy awards they receive? Or is it even the amount of merchandise created for each IP? There are so many different topics to analyse and extract information from, and so during the course of this blog I will hope to develop some answers, looking into the many franchises I both love and hate, in order to find out what makes different IPs more successful than others...
Before I begin to elaborate further, it to important note that I am no expert on Intellectual Property Law- I am no lawyer and the concept of IP is fairly new to me, as I have only been introduced to this term just over a couple of months ago. I'm armed with numerous media law books and endless IP webpages, and this blog will be a whole new learning process for me, with any conclusions I make based entirely around the research I have recently done!
So, its important to briefly define what I know to be Intellectual Properties or IPs. To offer a short and simple definition, its the umbrella term referring to the collection of laws, such as "copyright, trademarks, rights in ideas, rights of publicity, and privacy rights" (Crowell, 2007; p.13) that protect creations of the mind. In other words, your creative efforts, such as any scripts, characters and even any fictional locations you've made up, are yours and can be protected by rights! So, Intellectual Property Laws makes your intellectual creations YOUR property, an intangible property, but nonetheless, a form of property in the eyes of the law.
So, its important to briefly define what I know to be Intellectual Properties or IPs. To offer a short and simple definition, its the umbrella term referring to the collection of laws, such as "copyright, trademarks, rights in ideas, rights of publicity, and privacy rights" (Crowell, 2007; p.13) that protect creations of the mind. In other words, your creative efforts, such as any scripts, characters and even any fictional locations you've made up, are yours and can be protected by rights! So, Intellectual Property Laws makes your intellectual creations YOUR property, an intangible property, but nonetheless, a form of property in the eyes of the law.
Intellectual Properties are everywhere and have been for many years; since Disney's Mickey Mouse was trademarked in 1929, the list of registered IPs has grown, appearing all around us in our everyday lives- on our screens, clothing, crockery and even as toilet brushes! (see image below) So why are these laws important? Well, with like many other things in this world, this comes down to money; as these efforts are classified as a property, they can be used somewhat similarly to any other form of property, such as a house or a car. Having IPs enables financial benefits from creative commerce, as it gives the owner "economic rights, being rights of exploitation" (Bainbridge, 2002; p.25). These rights generate revenue, deriving from the value of the content, through selling, licensing and merchandising agreements, allowing your favourite show to make money through T-shirts, video games and even remakes with the same characters.
So, where does this all fit into my blog? Well, this leads me to ask the question- What makes an IP successful? Money? In a rich man's world it could initially appear so, but in a broader analytical sense, are there other things that could define the success of an Intellectual Property?
Over the next ten blog posts, filled with expressive gifs and terrible jokes to entertain you along my journey, I will be looking into the success of different Film and Television IPs- what are the means to which they attribute their success, how do they maintain it, and what effect does it have on the audiences who call themselves the fans..?
Let's find out!
Over the next ten blog posts, filled with expressive gifs and terrible jokes to entertain you along my journey, I will be looking into the success of different Film and Television IPs- what are the means to which they attribute their success, how do they maintain it, and what effect does it have on the audiences who call themselves the fans..?
Let's find out!
References and Bibliography:
- Crowell, T. (2007). The pocket lawyer for filmmakers. Amsterdam: Focal Press.
- Bainbridge, D. (2002). Intellectual property. Harlow, England: Longman.
- Andrews, H. (2014). Television and British Cinema: Convergence and Divergencesince 1990. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Bowrey, K., Handler, M. and Nicol, D. (2011). Emerging challenges in intellectualproperty. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
- Coombe, R. (1998). The cultural life of intellectual properties. Durham: DukeUniversity Press.
- Jacob, R., Alexander, D. and Blanco White, T. (1993). A guidebook to intellectualproperty. London: Sweet & Maxwell.
- MacQueen, H., Waelde, C. and Laurie, G. (2007). Contemporary intellectual property. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Manovich, L. (2002). The language of new media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
- Marshall, P. (2006). The celebrity culture reader. New York: Routledge.
- McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge.
- Waelde, C. and MacQueen, H. (2007). Intellectual property. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.
- Wipo.int, (2015). What is Intellectual Property?. [online] Available at:
- http://www.wipo.int/about-ip/en/ [Accessed 3 Jan. 2015].
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