This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we are going to dive into the online gaming and game development world in a conversation about gaming, intellectual property, licensing, game development, branding and much more. You can listen to our full discussion wherever you get your podcasts (links here) or visit IPWatchdog Unleashed on Buzzsprout. You can also watch the video on YouTube.
Our conversation this week focuses on Spaceport Technologies, which is a technology company that enables brand owners to monetize their IP and game platforms to offer content creators the ability to license the use of those brands within their game environment. To provide these licensed in-game experiences Spaceport uses innovative technology that reduces transaction costs and allows for the monetization of intellectual property assets. In fact, through the use of Spaceport protocols and apps the acquisition of rights and payment for those rights through numerous small dollar value transactions is not just faster and easier, the deals actually become possible.
Our first guest this week is Dan Temkin, who is General Counsel and Head of Intellectual Property for Spaceport Technologies. He began his career working for Procter & Gamble, where he spent nearly a decade. It was while he was at P&G that he became first introduced to intellectual property, telling me that as he worked with the IP attorneys, he came to the conclusion that what they were working on was “a lot more interesting” than what he was working on. Reaching that conclusion led him to Boston University for law school and ultimately a career in intellectual property, where he found himself working for a blockchain based video game company. When that company relocated to Japan, Dan was looking for his next interesting opportunity to work in the IP field and he talked with the founders of Spaceport and ended up becoming their first employee.
Our second guest this week is Jay Kolbe, a co-founder of Impact Partners, which is a strategic communications firm that focuses on family offices, venture capital and startup founders. Jay is a specialist in marketing technology-focused PR. He develops influential communications programs that increase the valuation of the companies he advises. And in addition to working with Spaceport, Jay also works with Josh Harlan and Harlan Capital, who we spoke with several weeks ago about how they invest in and monetize recuring IP revenue streams.
For those unfamiliar with online video games, user-based content creation and the opportunity for brands to license their IP within this big and continuously growing ecosystem, let’s take a step back and analogize to something many in the IP community probably have experience with.
For sake of discussion, let’s assume you are playing a more “tradition” video game, such as NFL Madden or perhaps UFC 5. You can create a UFC fighter or football player that you can play with within the game platform. Users can deck them out in an outfit of their choice, with different gloves or different trunks or helmets, or things like that. On some basic level this what we are talking about being enabled in an online gaming platform using Spaceport technology. Spaceport offers users who want to create content for the gaming universe the ability to customize their environment, their own characters, and to import things that would otherwise be branded or copyrighted. If other players want to purchase what is created, they can, which generates revenue for the creator. And thanks to Spaceport, the content creator gets the right to incorporate that IP without getting in trouble. So, the content creator makes money, the IP owner gets a license fee, and the purchaser gets to use within the game platform and environment something.
The secret sauce is eliminating to the greatest extent possible the transaction costs that would otherwise prohibit any deal at all because the transaction costs associated with giving licenses that are small scale to this many people would be cost prohibitive. So, Spaceport is creating a new way of thinking about licensing and enabling small transactions. The transactions are less than a dollar in many cases, but they can add up to big sums and meaningful monetization for IP owners.
Without further ado, here is my conversation with Dan and Jay.
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