Colin Seeger
Colin Seeger B.Juris LL.B launched his first specialist IP consultancy in 1996. It was established to advise commercial ventures on to how best to secure the maximum benefit from their creative effort and intellectual property.
Colin has provided commercial advice to a range of businesses and ventures including television networks, innovation-based ventures and international sporting events. He also assists technology start-ups to develop novel commercialisation and business processes, identifying early value in the business and to monetise potential opportunities based on their intellectual property.
Colin has also created a specialist business developing and articulating business system patents which are regionalised and filed by patent attorneys in the relevant territories. This is a relatively new field and still underutilized by most ventures and innovators. Through this work he has formed close relations with a number of international law firms and patent attorneys including Fish & Richardson in the USA. In that time provisional patents have been secured for the format of a tennis tournament and a boxing event as well as various food delivery systems, consumer products and financial structures.
Colin has a wide network of contacts and associates in record, television and new media companies and provides business affairs consultancy services to a range of digital entertainment distributors, content providers, multimedia developers and technology/software ventures and venture financers.
Colin has been actively involved in the music & media industry for over 25 years. Before starting the Intellectual Property management and commercialisation consultancy, he was co-partner in Simpsons Solicitors, where he specialised in commercial transaction law, licensing and protecting intellectual property, venture structuring and management of IP rights in commercial ventures. Clients included The Wiggles, Polygram Records (now Universal Music Group), Warner Music Publishing and MCA Music Publishing. He retains excellent relations with the industry. He co-authored Music Business which has become standard reference text for the Australian music industry.
Prior to joining the legal practice, he was Corporate Counsel and head of Legal & Business for Polygram Australia (now Universal Music) from 1984 to 1990, overseeing the Group’s legal work for the recording, home video and publishing divisions. This work included managing the catalogues of local and international copyrights and trademarks and complex deal negotiations with licensors and other media groups such as the TV and radio industries. In that time he oversaw the introduction of the CD and DVD, creation of Polygram’s music publishing business, negotiated with radio and television stations in battle for the pay-for-play for sound recordings and videos, oversaw content acquisition for the home video division and was part of the team which set up the first ABC Enterprises venture.
Colin started his involvement in intellectual property in 1980 when he worked at Stanley Gibbons the collectables firm in London; From there he moved to join a specialist team at Chappell Intersong International in London, recruited to develop an industry-first active-database copyright administration system which had to deal with the complexities of managing the company’s global catalogue of over 700,000 active song titles/copyrights.
He was guest lecturer at the University of New South Wales College of Fine Arts for two years teaching the post-graduate subject “Cultural Property, Ethics and the Law” and is visiting lecturer in business, IP and media law at Australian Institute of Music and at JMC Academy, lecturing in Tax and Business Structures, Media Law, Internet Law and running the thesis programs.
He was a member of the Australian Record Industry Association’s Copyright Committee for several years and was a member of the of The Law Society of New South Wales’ Ethics Committee for four years.
