Generational Wealth: The Power of Intellectual Property

"Intellectual property is the oil of the 21st century" - Craig Venter

"Intellectual property, invest in the creations of my mind, to get ahead and never fall behind." - RKease Company

In the book written by Stephen Johnson, called "The Guide to Intellectual Property", he speaks extensively on the economic, societal, and innovative impact that intellectual property has. Here goes on to state that, "INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY (IP) is worth an enormous amount of money. A crude calculation of the value of intangible assets, including IP, held by public companies can be made by subtracting the value of financial and tangible assets from their market capitalisation.........a substantial amount is attributable to IP, such as patents, designs, trademarks, domain names, copyrights, databases, trade secrets and know-how. By default, investors in most publicly quoted companies are investing in intellectual property."

Guide to Intellectual Property

In his book he also states that intellectual property in the US and Canada are an asset within themselves. This is what inspired my blog and gave me the insights needed to build my intellectual property portfolio as well for my business. In the business of music, you need to understand and learn a lot in order for you to be successful because it's an amalgamation of business, law, arts, and technology. I say technology because according to Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, "Every company is a software company."

Satya Nadella

Therefore website building, understanding analytics and being able to interpret data are imperative to your success as a whole being an artist-entrepreneur. Now the biggest money maker and the crux of the legal side of music goes into who owns the copyrights of an artists music catalogue because once you own a music catalogue and the rights too it, it becomes a digital asset in which you can monetise for your gain for however long the shelf life of the copyright lasts for. Going to the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, was crucial for me to learn because I was able to copyright my song "Step", since I owned the instrumental, the lyrics of the songs, and the master recording. Therefore, it enabled me to feel empowered because now I have a digital asset, in which I own that I can pass down to my children.

Step (CIPO)

Through this process, I was able to learn a lot in terms of the intellectual property office procedures to copyright your own song and now that I am in the database, I can see others who own rights to their songs as well. Sony Music Entertainment, the Canadian Songwriters Association, ASCAP, and many others actually own the rights to many songs and hits that come about on the radio that nobody even knows. It goes to show you that people get paid, while in return they lose their copyrights to music labels and have to buy their master recordings back in the future in order to have ownership. It's a different type of world when you see that you own your music and that it can be leveraged into other opportunities, if done correctly.

Another great thing, that I did, which is important to highlight is that I used artificial intelligence in my song writing and it didn't impede on me copyrighting my song with the Canadian Intellectual Property Office. Artificial intelligence is actually designed to be a tool that's used to enhance and empower the artist instead of actually taking away from the artist and infringing on their rights. It's actually ethical A.I. because I used it to help me generate the second verse for my song.

Overall, having intellectual property to my name has given me the capacity to understand generational wealth and something that I can pass down to future generations as a digital asset, since it's something that can be leveraged to make more money in the future as my business and brand starts to expand exponentially. I hope you enjoy the blog and I hope your day is full of rest, kindness, and ease, peace!