VV: So maybe I should just give a quick intro to eSports, what eSports is, how it evolves and where we are right now because eSports is a new concept for a lot of regulators. Basically, it’s professional players playing computer games. They are paid for it, they need to do their physical and mental exercise and so on. And it’s very challenging. It’s not like they’re a bunch of guys just playing computer games in the basement. They have houses and games and professional teams, and medical support and so on. And there are big competitions with millions in prize pool. Last year, the prize pool for the biggest tournament was around US$40 million. So it’s a really big industry and getting more and more professionalized. We started with a bunch of guys doing the tournaments and so on. But now we have the leagues, publishers are more involved, they have their own leagues, they have very tight control over everything about the team’s players and they are very active in working in the area of sports and gambling. They are trying to find out how to make eSports more sustainable and work with regulators and the gambling industry to bring more revenue back to eSports and to the players and teams. PL: From an IP perspective, which is my background I believe it is absolutely crucial that both the sports industry, including the eSports, and the gambling industry collaborate. The good old days are practically over where anybody could do whatever they wanted with their assets. So regardless of what jurisdiction we’re in we know that one of the main problems, and sources of conflict is around domain names, around trademarks, around unfair competition. Bottom line, we need proper regulation. I mean, this is something that we need to say at least once, right, so that I took care of that. And regarding IP, what we actually don’t need is the gambling regulation to get into it. Why? Because regulators usually when they regulate anything related to gambling, especially in very transparent jurisdictions such as European jurisdictions, and of course, the United States they do consult data protection bodies, they do consult the competition bodies, however, they don’t consult an IP agency. They don’t go to WIPO saying, are we managing this correctly? So what we definitely need to avoid is regulators putting anything in the rules regarding IP or new technologies. For instance, in the Spanish marketing regulations, three years ago, they defined in the regulation what a Video Exchange Service is when even the European directive wasn’t implemented in Spain. How crazy is that? They didn’t know how to define social media, they regulated TV of course which they knew a little bit more about, but we already had those transversal laws. So we definitely need to avoid that when we’re talking about IP. The second point that we need to consider is, what are the main assets that both industries, the sports industry and the gambling industry need to really take care of when they want to collaborate. Because the sport industry is still taking gambling money through sponsorships. So we all need to take stock of what activities what things we can do with our own assets, we need to make sure and this is for the sports leagues and clubs, and for the operators. We need to take stock. Do we have all our trademarks in place? Do we have them in all the territories where we are? And where do we want to be in five years? If we don’t do that we’re going to have a problem, we’re probably going to have to solve these issues through courts. And that gets very murky. We need a correct and proper domain names strategy because domain names are a no man’s land. There’s nothing really in each jurisdiction’s regulation. It’s all governed by ICAN. We do have an international arbitration system that we need to at least be aware of. We need to have correctly managed this for the sports league, the broadcasting rights, they’re not particularly IP rights, but the connected rights to the broadcasting they’re also part of what the sports league needs to have linked. Because all of these assets have to be defined in sponsorship agreements. And in those jurisdictions where each asset has its own nuances, such as in Spain, it is going to be very complicated. What we obviously cannot say is ‘okay, we’re not going to do sponsorship just because it’s a little bit complicated’. We need to tackle those problems and all of them are solvable. I mean, everybody understands that there’s a ban on sponsorship in Spain. There’s just a lot of things that can be done and when you’ve taken stock of those assets, if they’re not enough, create them. The previous panel talked about AI, blockchain, etc, etc. There hasn’t been a lot of mention of blockchain, but you need to create those assets. There are amazing solutions for fan tokens, etc. You need
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