RSG Media

IP Licensing

RightsLogic^® IP Licensing, born out of 20 years of experience building applications to manage intellectual property, is a suite of six integrated modules dedicated to tracking IP assets and their associated financials from inception to final use. A comprehensive end-to end system, RightsLogic manages the entire licensing process to extract maximum value from your assets.  Utilizing intelligent workflow functions, RightsLogic presents actionable information to the right people at the right time across different divisions. With RightsLogic, executives can reduce risk, minimize cost, manage cash flow, better manage relationships with licensees, and expose underutilization of IP assets.  

RightsLogic^® IP Licensing enables your organization to effectively manage the lifecycle of all licensed products from deal negotiation and royalty reporting to deal renewal. Maintain an audit of contract revisions, define key attributes for each product associated to a deal, import licensees’ royalty submissions in any format and seamlessly convert the data to adhere to your schema. RightsLogic^® traces every reported sale back to the most up-to-date version of the contract to verify that all deal points specified are executed appropriately. Moreover, robust reporting tools perform a comprehensive host of functions, from pivot reports that compare product sales performance to ready-to-mail form letters notifying licensees of delinquent behavior. 

Modular Design:

Features:  RightsLogic supports the following functions while offering the flexibility to define custom business processes that interact with, track, and manage all participants throughout the workflow:

Rights-Out: Capture and manage deal terms for any intellectual property

 

Asset Maintenance: Store metadata for all of your IP and create asset hierarchies.

 

Product Maintenance: Create custom product metadata and validate licensed products against contractual rights to ensure compliance.

 

Finance: Manage royalties, minimum guarantees and cross collateralization deals.  Track revenue recognition and plan cash flow to maximize revenues.

 

Reporting: RightsLogic® reports pull and interpret data using basic data views, pivot reports, graphical representations and form letters

 

UI Architect: Configure and customize the RightsLogic® application such as menus, modules, tabs, and fields to meet your specific desires using RightsLogic’s® UI Architect 

Administrative Tools: Manage security settings and determine which modules, tabs or fields each user or user group can see

Licensee Extranet: Communicate with licensees more effectively by providing financial reminders, track workflow, and a facility to upload electronic SKU and royalty statements

 

 

 

RightsLogic IP Licensing Process Flow:

Click here for additional IP Licensing information

 

RIGHTS-OUT

• Contract Management:  Ensure compliance with deal terms.  Track and manage multiple types of the most complex licensing deals from initial contract entry through execution. 
• Process Management:  Streamline business processes with approval workflows, notifications, and reminders triggered by critical milestones and data points.  Ensure a rapid and painless licensing process by eliminating manual document approval.  
• Rights Tracking:  Capture complex contractual deal terms using configurable dimensions.  Define license periods based on events or date driven milestones and inventory sell-off periods.  Capture and retrieve any royalty and payment terms.  Validate exclusivity conflicts based on available inventory and existing licensing deals.  Capture all miscellaneous contract obligations such as product credit, promotion fees, etc.
• Royalties Processing:  Generate complex royalty formulas using the RightsLogic^® Expression Builder.  Capture royalty expressions based on revenue percentages, per unit sales, or tiered sales.  Base tiers on milestones such as units sold, revenue milestones in any currency, and calendar date.  Distinguish royalty rates by any product type dimension.
• Minimize Data Entry:  Create and edit templates of most commonly used rights, territories, business terms, and royalty/payment obligations.  Organize your assets/properties into groups to conveniently add to deals.
• Deal Memo Generation:  Automatically generate deal memos in both data and long-form views.  Run historical deal memos from prior versions of a deal
• Document Management:  Store and edit documents, scanned originals, and product images for reference or for use in approval workflows.  Back up and retrieve versioned documents.  

ASSET MAINTENANCE

Asset Maintenance provides a centralized repository to store the metadata associated with all your intellectual property assets.  Define the attributes to be captured for each type of IP asset and group assets together to ease data entry. The other RightsLogic modules access asset information from this centralized location eliminating redundant data entry and ensuring data consistency.

Key Benefits:  

• Expedite Contract Entry:  Default specific assets or asset groups to certain deal types.
• Manage Complex Asset Hierarchies:  Asset hierarchies identify inter-related assets and can minimize data entry by endowing child assets with information from parent assets. 
• Reporting by Assets:  Search key asset data points throughout other RightsLogic modules.  Run one of many available reports to instantaneously discover historical asset-deal associations
• Open Architecture:  Open architecture allows for integration with external systems such as Digital Asset Management.

PRODUCTS

Effectively manage the lifecycle of all licensed products from deal negotiation through royalty reporting to deal renewal. Define key sales attributes required for each product type, automatically import licensee submissions in any format and seamlessly convert the data to adhere to your schema.  The RightsLogic® Products module traces each product back to the original contract to verify that all original deal points specified are executed appropriately. Utilize sophisticated reporting tools to compare product sales performance across various deals, IP's or rights categories.

Key Benefits:

• Product Creation and Validation:  Users define key product details and attributes for each product.  Add product information manually or import product details from a file to minimize time and effort.  RightsLogic^® validates products against contractual rights to ensure licensee compliance.
• Master SKU Listing Upload:  Communicate information seamlessly among license partners and disparate systems - RightsLogic^® allows licensees to submit product SKU’s and sales data in their own format by creating a translation dictionary that reformats the data into your terms.
• Performance Management:  Compare the performance of products from year to year, across different product types, or across various assets using one of the many pivot reports available within RightsLogic^®.

 

FINANCE

The RightsLogic^® Finance module allows users to effectively manage the entire financial lifecycle of a licensing deal including invoice processing, royalty statement upload with validation against deal terms, cash application, and revenue recognition. The finance module integrates seamlessly with all other RightsLogic^® modules, reporting tools, and third-party financial systems (ERP).  Users with security clearance may define and update transaction rules and general ledger codes as often as needed using the Transaction Dictionary.

 

Key Benefits:

• Multi-Party Payment Scheduling:  Calculate license fees, advances, royalties, bonuses, and guarantee overage/shortage in any currency.  Process date or event driven payments by using customizable templates to create payment and statement schedules that extend through the life of the license period  
• Royalty and Backend Participation Management:  RightsLogic’s^® powerful royalty import tool ingests all data from large statements within an instant.  The import tool seamlessly interprets all various spreadsheet formats to conform to your licensees’ reporting methods.  Validate Licensee adherence to royalty terms and identify revenue generated for unapproved products where necessary.  Generate both summary and detail royalty reporting history or customer statements for each period.
• Adjustments:  Process financial adjustments such as royalty statement reversal, invoice reversal and bad debt.  Automatically calculate interest based on configurable values.
• Guarantee Analysis:  Perform guarantee analysis on any licensed product to automatically determine overage/shortfall based on advances, royalties, or product returns.
• Cash Application:  Ingest cash receipts and wire transfers and apply those monies to outstanding invoices.  Capture extraneous fees like commissions and calculate foreign exchange rates and amounts.
• Revenue Recognition:  Define revenue recognition terms based on either cash or accrual accounting methods or automatically recognize revenues at specified points throughout the license period.  Define how revenue is recognized for each division or business unit within your enterprise.
• Transaction Dictionary:  Define accounting methods (cash vs. accrual) for different territories and roll up revenue to specific lines in the general ledger.  Manage transaction rules and quickly update ever-evolving general ledger codes.

 

REPORTING

RightsLogic^® reports pull and interpret data from every pocket of the application.   The reports satisfy an exhaustive number of use cases to ensure that users are not left unable to retrieve any valuable information housed in RightsLogic^®.  Whether a basic data view, pivot report, graphical representation or form letter, the series of reports generated by RightsLogic^® meet and exceed the needs of various user groups ranging from legal to finance, from insurance to licensing.  

 

Key Benefits:

 
• Instant Access to Rights Usage/Availability and Performance:  View rights availability by searching asset or product usage in contracts.  Identify strongest performing assets and products with a variety of pivot reports.  Gain insight into the strength of particular IP’s by comparing different products’ performance in similar distribution channels.
• Establish Best Reporting Practices:  Save, restore, and schedule reports to implement consistent reporting practices and improve the ability to project future financials.
• View Delinquent Licensees:  Ready-to-view list of licensees with past due payments.  Ready-to-send form letter reports designed to notify licensees of missing royalties and payment history.  Instant access to all soon-to-expire contracts.
• Standard Financial Reports:  Staples of any quality financial system, RightsLogic^® provides a number of basic reports that make a big impact, such as an Aging report and a Transaction report.  Immediately upon request, users can provide either in depth or summarized reports of their company’s financial activities

 ASSET MAINTENANCE

UI Architect is a client-server application used to configure and customize the RightsLogic^® application.  When enabled, it allows the administrator to configure menus, modules, tabs, and fields.

Key Benefits:

• Menu Configuration: The administrator can change the terminology used in the default menus and add new items to the menu to link to other programs.  The administrator can also add custom icons to the menu if desired.  
• Module Configuration: The administrator can choose which Modules to activate, change the names of the Modules, their display order within the group and change their icons.  
• Tab Configuration: The administrator can choose which Tabs to activate (Tabs can be different for each Deal or Asset type), change the names of the Tabs and their display order.
• Field Configuration: The administrator can choose which fields to activate within each tab, change the names of the field labels, and indicate whether a field is mandatory.  
• Benefit from new tabs and fields implemented by other RightsLogic customers: The UI Architect will always provide access to the full range of fields used by all RightsLogic customers. If another RightsLogic customer is using a field that would be of benefit to your business, simply launch UI Architect and click the checkbox to activate the field.
• UI Architect Configurations do not require a build: UI Architect modifies a simple configuration file. No build is necessary simplifying implementations.
• Preview Mode: Almost all configuration changes can be previewed from within the UI Architect program.  
• Introduce new functionality to your users over time:  Deactivate fields or Tabs that you don’t want to use until a later date.
• Low Maintenance & Customization Costs: Because UI Architect puts configuration control in your hands, there are no programming costs associated with reconfiguring the program and changes take just a few minutes to implement.

ADMINISTRATIVE TOOLS

Personalize the end user experience with the RightsLogic^® Administration module.  Determine which modules, tabs or fields each user or user group can see or use.  Design reminders, notifications and gadgets for each user group.  Control the look and feel of the user interface by integrating terminology specific to your business and tailoring the system to specific job function.  Bring together disparate systems, and use historic data to enhance reporting capabilities without sacrificing performance.

• Individual User Security: Manage the viewing and editing rights of an individual user.
• User Group Security: Manage the viewing and editing rights of any defined user group.  
• Tab-Based Security: Tools to dictate the viewing and editing of individual Tabs.  
• Service-Based Security: Limit the viewing of deal and asset related information to a service or network.
• Level of Access: Establish users’ level of access such as read-only, editing, and deleting rights.
• Protect Sensitive Information: Enable appropriate information to flow throughout the application without compromising sensitive data.
• Configuration:  Configure functionality to meet specific business needs. Personalize the system: set up screen and field order, rename fields, and manage field values; create custom asset types and metadata fields for each asset; determine which fields are required and which are optional.
• Manage Partner Lists: Edit and store parties for reuse and association with all deal types.
• Create Template Trees for Rights, Territories, and Other Configurable Values: Create, save and edit templates for reuse with different partners or types of deals.

LICENSEE EXTRANET

Facilitate interaction and communication with all external parties via the Licensee Extranet. Create a standard portal that can be customized with logos and links for each licensee to provide a familiar look-and-feel. Send notifications and payment reminders based on system actions or allow licensees to easily upload royalty statements and products requiring approval through a seamless integration with RightsLogic^®. 

Key Benefits:

• Flexible Design: Quickly create web sites for new licensees and customize layout, functionality and security around functionality.    
• Style Guides and Image Library:  Maintain style guides, product catalogs, reporting codes and image galleries online and control the security to each.
• Product Royalty Statement Submission:  Reduce paper or email copies submission of statements and master SKU lists by allowing licensees to upload files or enter data online. Notify internal users of licensee actions and automatically perform contract validation.
• Deal Memo Generation:  Allow licensees to generate an electronic version of the contract along with any business terms or associated documenation. 
• Automated Notifications:  Send notifications directly to licensees via reports or email.