The IPChain Association and the Skolkovo Foundation organized a thematic round table dubbed, "New types of intangible assets and their relation to intellectual property", within the Global IP Exchange in the German capital. The event brought together high-profile experts to discuss new types of intellectual property objects and other intangible assets, as well as to provide an overview of the situation in various markets.

On the sidelines of the conference the delegation held talks with representatives of renowned companies such as SAP, Microsoft, Lenovo, TetraPak, Google, Samsung and others.

Participants of the round table: IPChain Association president Andrey Krichevsky, chairman of the board of digital crowdlending platform CO-FI Alexander Sukhotin, lawyer and partner at Noerr LLP Torsten Kraul, patent counsel and lawyer in intellectual property law Matthew M. Yospin and Russia's Internet ombudsman and Radius Group company CEO Dmitry Marinichev. Anton Pronin, director of the Legal Technologies Center of the Skolkovo Foundation, moderated.

"We are witnessing global changes that the digital world brings. And despite our attempts to ignore it, we all will have to follow the new rules in a few years. So, we have decided to take steps right now," IPChain president Andrey Krichevsky stressed. "We have analyzed the world economic trends to work out a universal business model of IP market architecture. IPChain distributed ledger is the core of this architecture, thus ensuring effective launch of intangible assets and new IP objects to the market. We have created a fully-fledged infrastructure and instruments in order to provide swift capitalization of intangible assets and new IP objects."

An overview of new types of intangible assets (IA) that emerged along with the former traditional types was presented. It considers digital assets, assets based on blockchain technology, reputation, virtual currencies, publicity, confidentiality and the right to be forgotten, domain names, memes, smart contracts, etc., as such assets. It also singled out social networks, where IA consider the number of subscribers, the number of posts, likes, reposts and views.

"The emergence of new types of IA today is setting the global community with the task of creating new algorithms for the interaction of participants, new ways of protection and new law enforcement practices that will allow us to regulate a changing market," Matthew Yospin said in conclusion.

Anton Pronin stressed that the new digital era provided enormous opportunities for discovering and creating such intangible assets that constitute real economic value: "Digital data is becoming the main value in the digital world, and it is surely to be defined as intellectual property assets in the near future…we will get access to that very 'blue ocean market' with high commercialization potential…it is only possible if we provide effective 'transport' for market participants' networking. We will succeed only through implementing innovative technologies, latest services and platforms."

The outcome of the talks is encouraging – it is time to overcome the challenges and use the opportunities of this very promising and unexplored IP sphere, intertwined with innovative technologies.