26th November 2009
Dear Ms Black,
Thank you for your Freedom of Information request dated 29th October 2009 asking for details of
correspondence between NESTA representatives and PACT.
I thought that it would be helpful to summarise the projects that we have been working with PACT
on over the last 2 years. The correspondence released in a separate appendix covers 3 areas:
1. In March 2008 NESTA gave PACT a £20k grant to draft and publish legal frameworks for
teaming up TV production companies with digital media companies. The rationale was that
media production is rapidly converging but the necessary legal templates for collaboration
were not yet developed. PACT normally publish such documents behind a password
protected area of their membership website. One of the requirements for the grant was that
PACT would make the documents open to all. PACT are the most appropriate organisation to
do this, having a membership made up of both TV and digital media production companies.
2. Since December 2008, PACT have been partners with us on the Creative Business Mentor
Network – as one of the trade bodies for the TV and digital media production industry, we
sought their partnership to recruit businesses for, develop and potentially be adoption
partners for successful elements of the programme. Nick Underhill from PACT sat on the
selection panel for recruiting both mentors and mentee companies.
3. In March 2009 NESTA gave PACT a £10k grant to explore the potential benefits of smarter
public procurement of digital media. This involved producing a report, running a workshop
and providing NESTA with recommendations for next steps. These directly fed into NESTA’s
proposal to Digital Britain to pilot a new IP framework for the procurement of digital media.
Since the publication of Digital Britain in June 2009, PACT has been one of a number of
contributors on an industry panel to help draft and test a new rights framework model for
public procurement of digital media.
In addition, John McVey, the CEO of PACT has spoken at 2 NESTA events, for which there is
likely to be correspondence with the events team.
The correspondence released in Appendix 1 includes both the formal emails regarding the above 3
areas, and some operational emails concerning the running of these projects.
Also provided are pdf copies of agreements between NESTA and PACT.
Daniel Oppenheimer
Chief Operating Officer
NESTA
