Rights awareness platform

WIPO for Creators is launching a rights awareness platform with the aim of supporting creators worldwide across the many different creative fields. This vital initiative will make it its mission to increase knowledge around creators’ intellectual property rights and related management practices. The founding charter of WIPO for Creators sets out the principle objectives to assist creators around the world in appreciating that the exploitation of intellectual property is the basic business model that enables them to succeed in economic terms. By helping creators understand the complexities of the creative industries, it will help them maximise the value of their creations. Free to creators all around the world, Creators Platform is the primary activity of WIPO for Creators as it pursues its objective to raise awareness and increase knowledge of creators’ intellectual property rights and the related processes needed to achieve fair acknowledgment and compensation for their craft. A creator-driven service in the form of high-quality interactive ‘Microlearning’ videos, featuring high-profile creators from every creative industry, Creators Platform will provide continuously updated and relevant information on-demand. Delivered in bite-sized chunks, at the creator’s preferred time and pace, and on any type of device, each text and video will be designed to quickly provide answers to questions as they arise in real-time, often during the creative process. Content relevant to domestic markets may well include learning units in this same format delivered by local experts sourced from within the WIPO for Creators Member, Sponsor & Friend community. Whilst the Creators Platform will ultimately be used as a vehicle to educate creators in all industries, including literature, audiovisual, dramatic arts and visual arts, the initial minimum viable version of the Creators Platform will be targeted at creators in the music industry to validate the core hypotheses with prospective users.

On demand, global audience

 In the modern era, where digital services move at increasingly high-speed, the sharing and exploitation of creative works at a global level is becoming ever more significant. Until now, copyright infrastructure, tools and solutions, the importance of being organised about creative industry intellectual property rights information, and the precision needed in metadata descriptions and standards required by the media industry has not been a priority for most creators. However, the rapid changes seen in the digital services industry have highlighted the importance of creator awareness regarding the processes that are required to exercise their intellectual property rights. We therefore find ourselves at an important inflexion point where we must make the effort to educate and support our planet’s creators if they are to be properly incentivised in continuing to develop new work. In the 21st century, where everybody has everything available at their fingertips, education technology is quickly shifting to a “resources, not courses” approach. Millennials in particular demand that information is made accessible to them on the go. To motivate them to use a learning system you have to meet them where they live – on their devices. These help learners get the most from training by providing always-available content from anywhere. With the rise of handheld devices, lightning-fast Internet speeds, and short attention spans, it is no surprise that Microlearning and Microlearning platforms have exploded onto the eLearning scene. Smartphone users finish courses on average 45% faster while being dispersed in a variety of locations, whilst learning in stretches of 3-5 minutes matches the human working memory capacity and attention span. Allowing access to educational materials throughout the daily routine, during pauses in regular work, and while participating in activities that don’t require complete attention, the Creators Platform will provide real-time instruction and immediate problem-solving capability during specific tasks. This opens up the possibility of making new learning more relevant and selfdirected than ever.

Creators Platform vision

WIPO for Creators will seek to leverage and incorporate the best-of-breed in existing creator education services and recent innovations in the education platform technology marketplace. Utilising contemporary education technology products, platforms and component building blocks, WIPO for Creators will provide the online interactive tools needed to deliver the scalable, global, cloud-based Creators Platform as a service. This composable approach is consistent with modern technology methods of integrating industry leading platforms and services to maximise outcomes, whilst minimising software development costs and delivery timeframes. As such, WIPO for Creators recognises the modern ethos of “build less, achieve more”. There are similarities from a content perspective, whereby employing a Microlearning outlook to training is both cost and time efficient, with solutions built at a lower cost than traditional long-form training curricula. The design for the Creators Platform will allow for tracking measures and reporting to see how the service demonstrably changes creator’s lives, a means of evaluating the benefits envisaged by WIPO for Creators. Releasing early and often, the platform will monitor and assess the tangible impacts and learning outcomes to continuously improve user experience. Whenever possible, results and impacts will be quantitatively measured and qualitatively assessed, with support for such analysis inbuilt into the system. WIPO for Creators will employ a number of learner acquisition strategies to find the blend that is most successful and efficient. These strategies will be developed in partnership with WIPO for Creators Members and Sponsors, who already have a connection with the target userbase and have agreed to promote the Creators Platform. These collaborations will go hand in hand with perfecting the domestic content available in local markets.

Sustainable & well-governed

The activities of the Consortium will be financed through a WIPO for Creators Fund-In-Trust, which will be administered by WIPO pursuant to its Financial Regulations and Rules and used exclusively to cover the costs of the implementation of WIPO for Creators activities. WIPO for Creators is a not-for-profit consortium funded by voluntary contributions including private and public sponsorship and membership fees. It is crucial that WIPO for Creators is a sustainable, fully self-funded initiative in order to maintain its independent goals.

By creators, for creators

The Creators Platform will be designed in close collaboration between experienced creators and modern digital service architects, and WIPO for Creators intends to deliver the initial version within its first year of operation. Online interactive in-built features will be developed to help tangibly assess how learning received from the Creators Platform is having real impacts on the lives of users including what they are now able to do with that knowledge. Based on learner habits, the Creators Platform will start to understand behaviours and makes relevant content recommendations according to the users’ preferences. Using these quantitatively measured learner assessment capabilities, the Creators Platform evolution will be designed to support an ever wider engaged set of global creators. Every creator in the world will be able to establish a free account with the Creators Platform. Having access to the platform will develop increased awareness and improved knowledge of intellectual property rights and related processes and give creators the resources they need in order to fully exploit their economic potential in relation to the work they produce.

In conclusion

The Creators Platform is needed now more than ever and will be made available to creators of all types around the world. This is an important undertaking, and WIPO for Creators is the right vehicle for delivering such a global and holistic solution sustainably for the long term. We are at an important and historic inflexion point where we as a community must make the effort to support the planet’s creators. Whoever you are and whatever role you play in the creative industries, please add your strength in whichever way you can to this crucial endeavour.