Security Rights in Intellectual Property

Book excerpt: This book discusses the main legal and economic challenges to the creation and enforcement of security rights in intellectual property and explores possible avenues of reform, such as more specific rules for security in IP rights and better coordination between intellectual property law and secured transactions law. In the context of business financing, intellectual property rights are still only reluctantly used as collateral, and on a small scale. If they are used at all, it is mostly done in the form of a floating charge or some other “all-asset” security right. The only sector in which security rights in intellectual property play a major role, at least in some jurisdictions, is the financing of movies. On the other hand, it is virtually undisputed that security rights in intellectual property could be economically valuable, or even crucial, for small and medium-sized enterprises – especially for start-ups, which are often very innovative and creative, but have limited access to corporate financing and must rely on capital markets (securitization, capital market). Therefore, they need to secure bank loans, yet lack their own traditional collateral, such as land.