Intellectual Property Management
Colin Seeger has been actively involved in the music & media industry for over 25 years. Before starting the Intellectual Property management and commercialization consultancy, he was a partner in the boutique legal practice Simpsons Solicitors, where he advised on licensing and protecting intellectual property, venture structuring and management of IP rights in businesses and organisations.
Prior to that he was Corporate Counsel and head of Legal & Business for Polygram Australia overseeing the Group’s legal work for the record, home video and publishing divisions as well as managing administration and protection of the company’s extensive catalogues of copyrights, trademarks and other intellectual property. This led on from the work he had been doing while retained by Chappell Music Publishing in London, as part of a team building a cutting-edge active-database copyright administration system in the early 1980’s.
He sat on the Australian Record Industry Association’s Copyright Committee and was a member of the of The Law Society of New South Wales’ Ethics Committee for four years. He is now on the Board of the Australian Music Managers’ Forum and is a part time lecturer at TAFE Ultimo teaching commercial courses focusing on media licensing and venture structuring.
He co-authored the first edition of the national industry-standard text “Music Business”, was a lecturer at the University of New South Wales College of Fine Arts teaching the post-graduate subject “Cultural Property, Ethics and the Law” and is a guest lecturer at Sydney TAFE.
In 1996, he started Abilong to advise commercial ventures of all kinds in secure maximum benefit from their creative efforts. In parallel to this, the consultancy provides commercial advice to a wide range of companies, artists and media companies including television networks, children’s and life-style TV programmes, global sporting events (e.g. www.superfighter.tv) and assisted technology start-ups, to develop novel commercialization strategies and provided Apple with the demonstration disc for the Asian launch of the iPod.
Abilong has a close relationship with Fish & Richardson in the US (www.fr.com) and has developed a particular niche business, creating business system patents.
As a result of this work he has developed a global network of media contacts and associates in record, television and new media companies and provides business affairs consultancy services to a range of content providers, independent record labels and media developers.