President of IPChain Association says on the need to increase digital interaction of government, citizens and businesses

24.04.2019

Text by: Andrey Krichevsky (President of IPChain Association, Secretary General of the Confederation of Rightholders’ Societies of Europe and Asia (CRSEA))

The first day of IPQuorum 2019 was dedicated to development of human capital. The topic was not chosen at random. We focus, on the one hand, on vectors that the country’s top leadership sets for us. And some time ago, the President said that a citizen is the main value and capital of the country. On the other hand, the topic, of course, is relevant for businesses.

The funny thing is that Communist regimes were the main adepts of the theory of human capital. The book by Gary Becker, an American economist and one of the founders of the theory, is most actively sold out in communist countries. In the USSR, education and medicine were in fact of great importance; serious work was done in innovations and in a certain sense the living environment developed. There was, at least, a very clear understanding of what needs to be done to achieve a certain career and social level.

However, the Soviet recipes for the development of human capital were not suitable for the long-term perspective. In my opinion, the reason is that the Soviet authorities put a lot of effort, resources and time into human capital, but did not learn how to manage it and did not consider the citizens creative potential as an asset. That, however, was due to the social system in the first place. And as a result, we received strong, healthy, knowledgeable people who understand that it is necessary to move forward, but who do not know how to use their own creativity.

And creativity needs to be taught. There is a theory of creativity, which explains how to fit “for the shell”, what activities any creative person performs while thinking over this or that idea. That was not done in Soviet times and it is important to do it now. Otherwise, it will be a mismatch. Health care and education, with difficulties in ensuring living conditions and labor efficiency, add up to only one supporting element, you can’t go far on it, as on one foot. We need the other foot, the second supporting element, which is creativity and innovation.

At the same time, in the short term, the Soviet Union showed significant success. In no case should we abandon this experience. Soviet recipes, of course, need to be studied and applied, by adapting them to modern realities and eliminating drawbacks.

At present Russia there is an understanding at the federal level of the importance of human capital. But this understanding has not yet poured into any specific actions, events, or programs. I am sure that the ideas voiced at our forum will be useful when the country switches to practical work.

The topic of the second day of the forum is “Law and Technology”. We discussed legal issues relevant to the Russian intellectual property market. Among such issues are the protection of art and technological achievements, rights in the computer industry, information security of modern cities and many more.

If we talk about Russian legislation, I want to agree with one of the speakers of IPQuorum 2019, Anna Kostira, Managing Partner at Deloitte Legal CIS, the global network of consulting and audit companies. Back at the plenary meeting, she said a very correct thing: everything is fine with the laws in the Russian Federation, but we have a problem with the enforcement of such.
The level of digital interaction among the government, citizens and business in the country is really low despite that recently a huge number of various legal services have appeared. For example, Lyudmila Novoselova, the Chief Justice of the Intellectual Property Rights Court, spoke about the importance of creating online mediation services and any other forms of pretrial interaction that would permit fewer cases heard in courts. Totally agree with that, because the court is always the last tool. So ‘legal tech’ solutions are now needed both as tools for organizing the interaction of government, citizens and business, and as a means of resolving disputes without involving the judiciary.

Speaking about the subject of the third day, “Money, Markets, Values”, an important trend should be mentioned. In recent years, according to a study conducted by Baker McKenzie, a global consulting company, dozens of new categories of intangible assets and intellectual property items (IPIs) with a high potential for commercialization have appeared. These assets, however, are not perceived as the results of intellectual activity and, accordingly, are not involved in the economic turnover.

Look at accounts and content on social networks. There is, for example, a great playwright Alexander Tsypkin, who has an interesting blog (page) on Facebook. You read his posts like a book. And how, in fact, is Tsypkin’s Facebook different from the book? In no way it’s different, except for our perception and the way of transmitting information. Or think of Caramba TV Internet channel with their show “+100500”. How is this different from series or shows that go on regular TV channels? Again, there’s practically no difference.

There are many such “underestimated” intellectual property assets. These include prestige and business reputation of a company, “museum values”, sports symbols, biometric data, and so on. And there is a question of how to monetize and protect such assets. I think, in case of protection we should use our experience in protection of classic intellectual property items by adapting existing mechanisms to the new categories of intangible assets and intellectual property.

As for monetization, IPChain has developed a model of the intellectual property market architecture. You could see it at the IPQFair Exhibition, which was held at the Forum. One of the purposes of this business model is cost-effective work with the usual categories of intangible assets. And also with the so-called synthetic intellectual property objects, which include, for example, cable TV channels – not as a collection of audiovisual works, but as a signal – and even with innovative projects.

There are five levels in the architecture: industrial (business applications and cloud services), ecosystem, platform, infrastructure, and state-legal. The infrastructure level in Russia is mainly collected from the decentralized IPChain intellectual property registry. Major players of the intellectual property market and other sectors of the economy where they work with synthetic intellectual property objects, will be able to directly use this tool And indirectly, through network nodes, the registry will be available, in principle, to every person, because the services that are created on the basis of IPChain concern everyone.

For example, there is a digital b2b FONMIX service, where authors can upload their music and be rewarded for its public performance. The same service allows you to carry out large-scale monitoring of the digital environment, to receive advanced data about the target audience. There are n’RIS services for copyright holders who create any content and want to track its illegal use, for anyone who wants to test themselves for plagiarism, and many others, including for the industrial property market.