Crafts and Visual Arts Are Big Business
Marketing Crafts and Visual Arts: The Role of Intellectual Property
The global crafts and visual arts market is worth tens of billions of dollars annually. Every year, priceless (and not so priceless) art is stolen, artists’ creations are shipped abroad to be bootlegged, and millions in revenue are lost. For unaware artists, their best work can be easily exploited.
Creative industries will contribute an estimated $1.3-trillion to the world economy in 2005, according to the United Nations Agency on Trade and Development. In the U.S, the crafts industry alone generates $14-billion annually. Worldwide, it’s estimated to be worth $35-billion. Craft and visual arts — sculpture, painting, photography, printmaking, illustrating, performance art, installation art, multimedia, video art, web design, product, web and graphic design are just a few examples – today account for an enormous worldwide industry that is especially important to protect from theft.
Understanding the intrinsic value of a creation is easy for many, but defining and protecting this value so it earns revenue for the creator can seem as undefined as a rock in the fog.
Enter: Intellectual Property Rights.
No longer is protecting these rights the sole venue of big music, film and software companies. Intellectual property rights have hit the mainstream. "The intellectual property system is the best available tool for creating and maintaining exclusivity over creative and innovative output in the marketplace," note World Intellectual Property Organization’s Director-General Kamil Idris and International Trade Centre Executive Director J. Denis B�lisle in the preface to Marketing Crafts and Visual Arts: The Role of Intellectual Property.
The enormous increase in the flow of ideas and trade through international trade liberalization means that protecting creative rights has become a matter of international importance to artists as well as lawmakers. WIPO and ITC’s new book, Marketing Crafts and Visual Arts: The Role of Intellectual Property, is a practical guide designed for trades-people and artists who want to successfully create income streams that support them in doing their best — and most creative — work. That means protecting intellectual property rights in the international marketplace.
The book links intellectual property protection to the proven income generating tools of business development and marketing in a way that is simple and easy-to-understand. It is designed with no-nonsense, easy-to-understand language and case studies. Marketing research strategies and product development planning are described with a light touch that’s not filled with difficult-to-understand business jargon. Business tools are described in simple steps and use real-life examples to illustrate points. Case studies are examined with an eye on available tools: copyright, industrial design, trademarks, collective marks, certification marks, geographical indications, trade secrets, patents and licensing. The aim is to harness intellectual property rights so that creativity can be most productively expressed in the marketplace.
Harris Tweed, Maori arts and crafts makers, and American artist and entrepreneur, Mary Engelbreit are a few of the featured cases. They exhibit the diverse range of artists and trades-people employing protections while reaching out to a larger market.
Marketing Crafts and Visual Arts: The Role of Intellectual Property is a 134-page practical guide published jointly in Geneva, Switzerland by the International Trade Centre (ITC) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It is available in English, French and Spanish.
Marketing Crafts and Visual Arts: The Role of Intellectual Property
http://www.wipo.int/sme/en/documents/guides/guide_marketing_crafts.html
ISBN 92-9137-264-1
