PRESENTERS:
Pete Mathias, Bertelsmann Entrepreneurs Program, Bertelsmann
Vaughn Mckenzie-Landell, CEO & Co-Founder, JAAK

Pete Mathias & Vaughn Mckenzie-Landell
Topic: Pioneering Music Blockchain Pilot: Learnings & Application For The Wider IP Industries
The complexities of copyright and IP management have the music industry in a stranglehold, affecting creators, rights holders, and those who license music – but blockchain offers a potential solution, a unified framework to collaborate on a single view of rights. London-based tech start-up JAAK is laying the foundation for an industry-wide solution with their blockchain-based rights network KORD, with the goal of providing a single global view of intellectual property information. With a successful pilot including key music industry players behind them, the potential gains are huge and extend beyond music into broader IP and content industries. JAAK CEO Vaughn McKenzie-Landell and Bertelsmann’s Pete Mathias discuss the outcomes of the music pilot and the wider implications for the creative sector.

Media and technology industry leaders offer a big-picture view of the current state of media rights management and licensing for rights owners and users, how technology is changing the way rights are cleared and paid for, and whether new technologies such as crypto and A.I. can make rights markets more efficient, scalable and transparent.

PANELISTS:
Deep Ghumman, Principal, Advisory Services, EY
Lillian Ruiz, COO & Co-Founder, Civil Media Company
Jarrod Dicker, CEO, Po.et
Jesse Grushack, Co- Founder, Ujo Music

As digital platforms and devices create ever-more use cases and licensing opportunities for copyrighted content, rights owners rights owners face an ever-more complex task of matching rights-out to rights-in. How are media companies meeting the challenge of enterprise-scale rights management in an increasingly complex licensing landscape?

Machine-to-machine rights management requires machine-readable rights data. A look at how different media industries are tackling the challenge of assigning standardized, machine-readable identifiers and metadata to creative works, how those data are registered and made available, and the relationship between private registries and public records.

PANELISTS:
Jacob Varghese, Founder & Director, Noctil
Daniel Doubrovkine, CTO, Artsy.net
Michael Simon, President, Rumblefish; CEO, Harry Fox Agency LLC
Mario Pena, Product Manager, Safe Creative Ltd.

From photographs and paintings, to musical work sand poetry, the value of many types of creative works lies in their attribution and provenance. But the lack of reliable records of ownership and authorship makes buying and selling them risky and leaves authors and creators uncredited and often unpaid. This panel will examine how entrepreneurs are leveraging blockchain and other technologies to create verified records of a work’s origin and history.

PANELISTS:
Robert Norton, CEO & Co-Founder, Verisart
Jackson Turner, Partner, Soundchains
Drew Waters, Vice President, VEVA Sound

Digital technology did away with scarcity, upending many media industry business models. But the economics of scarcity may be poised for a comeback thanks to blockchain. This panel will explore how artists, entrepreneurs and developers are leveraging blockchain technology to create new businesses around digital collectibles, limited editions and unique digital assets.

PANELISTS:
Mark Willis, Co-Founder and Chief Design Officer, Texel
Alex Bulkin, Co-Founder & Chief Alchemist, CoinFund

Copyright legislation in the U.S. and Europe is poised to bring the most sweeping changes in decades to how media content is distributed, licensed, and used. Industry leaders, policymakers and legal experts will discuss how the changes will the changes affect artists, rights owners, content users, and consumers, and where the debate goes from here.

PANELISTS:
Amelia Wang, Vice President, Government and Industry Affairs, NMPA
Ben McEwen, Commercial Director, ICE (London)
MODERATOR: Keith Kupferschmid, CEO, Copyright Alliance

Fireside Chat with Merck Mercuridias and Nile Rodgers of Hipgnosis

Merck Mercuridias, CEO, Founder, & Managing Partner, Hipgnosis Songs Ltd
Nile Rodgers, Grammy Award-Winning Producer, Songwriter, Musician, and Singer

INTERVIEWER:
Robert Levine, Author, Freelance Writer

Leaders from the worlds of finance, startups, and venture capital provide an overview of the M&A and investment climate for rights management companies, and discuss the valuation of rights and royalties and their potential as an asset class in their own right.

PANELISTS:
Daniel Dewar, Founder, Paperchain
Virginie Berger, Managing Partner, DBTHCap Ventures

Many uses of copyrighted works in mixes, mashups and user-generated content go uncounted and uncompensated. Others never happen because they can’t be licensed. This panel will explore how entrepreneurs and developers are tackling some of the most confounding and complex challenges in rights management.

PANELISTS:
Noah Becker, President, AdRev
Rasty Turek, CEO, Pex

Artists and entrepreneurs discuss how technology is enabling creators to manage and finance their own careers and retain control of their work.

PANELISTS:
Dae Bogan, CEO & Founder, TuneRegistry

The music business has its notorious “black box” money problem, but creators and licensors in many rights-based industries lack effective tools to track the money their works generate as it makes its way back upstream. This panel will examine how entrepreneurs, developers, artists and agents are trying to bring greater transparency to the system of accounting and payments.

PANELISTS:
Cédric Cobban, President and Founder, PeerTracks Inc.
Eugene Mopsik, CEO, American Society for Collective Rights Licensing (ASCRL)

Courts say monkeys can’t own copyrights, but what about machines? As artificial intelligence systems increasingly are used to create music, photographs, news articles, and artworks, who or what owns the copyrights? If not that machine then whose creative input controls and how should it be credited? Can an A.I. system join a CMO?

PANELISTS:
Christopher Sprigman, Professor, NYU School of Law, Co-Director, Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy
Taishi Fukuyama, Co-founder, COO, Amadeus Code
Ahmed Elgammal, CEO, Artrendex
MODERATOR:  Edward Klaris, Managing Partner, KlarisIP