Jean La Rose, the former CEO of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, discusses the importance of intellectual property in business and offers advice to Indigenous businesses.
Transcript: "Aboriginal Peoples Television Network"
Video Length: 3:41
Text displays:
"Success stories of IP"
Jean La Rose:
My name is Jean La Rose. I'm the Chief Executive Officer of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network and APTN is the world's first Indigenous television broadcaster, and we do programming by, for and about Indigenous peoples in Canada.
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"Briefly describe APTN’s intellectual property (IP) portfolio."
Jean La Rose:
We have a broad range of both copyright and trademark registrations. And the purpose for that is to ensure that everything that we create, everything that we do in the form of either programming or other initiatives, whether it's special events that we hold, we want to make sure that we protect our brand, we protect our rights and prevent anyone from using them in a way that might negatively impact the network.
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"Why does registering for Canadian trademarks matter to Indigenous businesses?"
Jean La Rose:
When you look at the uniqueness of the products that Indigenous artists, artisans and others create, I think it's really important for them to protect what they do. There is interest around the world into a lot of what they create and if they don't protect it we've seen examples of whether it's a sculpture, whether it's a painting, whether it's an art form being copied elsewhere and then the imitations flood our market here diminishing the opportunity for the artist to actually benefit from their creations. And what we believe in is it's really important to register, to clearly stake your mark on a given product, a given image, a given creation, so that no one can unfortunately copy it and then benefit from the work that the artist or the creator had.
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"What would be some concerns if your network did not protect its IP?"
Jean La Rose:
Use of some of our imagery whether it's the logo or something else outside of Canada. And sometimes a lot of our trademark has also been registered like the logo if I recall correctly has been registered worldwide as far as we could anyways many jurisdictions certainly in the U.S. and elsewhere in North America pretty well everywhere. So the goal here is the fear would be that if someone were to use it to try to create sort of a fake product that could damage our brand that's one of the key reasons why we insist on not only doing that but that's one of the key concerns we have about not registering.
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"What is your advice for Canadian Indigenous businesses or artists who would like to protect their IP?"
Jean La Rose:
My recommendation to them would be it's not an expensive process. We do it on a regular basis, for some it may look expensive, but when you consider what could be the value of the loss of not registering, I think it's really important for them to consider that they need to register their trademarks, they need to register their copyrights, if they've created a product, if they've created a process, if they’ve created something that is truly unique, they should protect it because if others start copying it, the value that that product has may become nil and they will not have been able to really benefit from their creation so it's key in our view at APTN to register and to ensure that we give protection to our creations.
Text displays:
"Success stories of IP"
Image displays:
Canada logo
