Legal Niches

Ontario Antes Up for Creative Community

By John Keefer

Ontario is investing $10 million into the creative community with the announcement today of the Intellectual Property Development Fund.

The fund, according to a story in The Globe and Mail, is a one-year pilot program that reimburses "screen-based companies for expenses in getting their Internet projects off the ground. This includes video games. Applications for funds will be available Monday.

The story said that Ontario's creative sector has been doing well and that the governmetn wanted to do something to recognize that, a move that has met with resistence in other countries, most recently the United Kingdom.

'It meets a niche that needed to be addressed,' adds [Ontario's minister of culture Aileen] Carroll. 'It stems from a recognition that it's at the beginning [of a project] that screen-based content developers face the biggest challenge."

Each company that receives funds will be limited to $150,000. Activities eligible for assistance include "story rights, script-writing (including editing and work-shopping), design creation, preparation of game design documents and technical specifications as well as market research (including prototype testing, focus groups, audience analysis) and the preparation of proposals for submission to potential financiers."

The grants requests will be screened by the Ontario Media Development Corporation and companies must show that more than 50 percent of its revenue is derived from "screen-based content products." Projects that will not be funded include TV and film projects covering sports, current events, talk and reality TV.

Full post as published by GamePolitics.com on December 10, 2009 (boomark / email).