ABSTRACT
Introduction: intellectual property as security for a loan Increasingly over recent years, even decades now, intellectual property has come to the fore as comprising a variety of valuable business assets in many industries, and is thus potentially a subject for secured financing transactions. In the United States with its highly evolved film and television, music and computer software industries, all heavily reliant on intellectual property rights (notably copyright), legal and practical issues relating to the use of these assets as loan collateral have taken on particular significance. Governments in other jurisdictions have also started coming to grips with the various legal and practical issues inherent in attempts to utilise such rights in this context. In 2001, for example, the Law Commission of Canada hosted a major international conference to consider federal reform of Canadian secured finance law to better accommodate securities over intellectual property.1
