They call it a dumb number for smart people, and if you haven’t yet heard of ISAN, the folks at the CFTPA are willing to bet that in the next 12 months you’ll come to know about it, and to love it.

At an information session at TIFF on Wednesday, industry veterans Sandra Macdonald and Stephen Ellis introduced the newly formed agency ISAN Canada to a packed room (okay, there were only 12 chairs) of interested delegates foregoing a film, schmooze or Woody Allen press conference to talk copyright protection.

Administered by the CFTPA and chaired by Ellis, with Macdonald as vice chair, ISAN Canada is a division of the Geneva-based International Standard Audiovisual Number.

What an ISBN is to books, ISAN will be to audiovisual products, said Ellis. ‘But ironically, it’s late coming to this industry.’

It’s a standardized registration number that permanently identifies AV content in a centrally located database administered from within each participating nation. The three-part number encodes ‘tombstone information’ about the type of product — whether it’s a film, television program, commercial, computer game or mobisode — as well as the episode and version, including the edit, language and format information.

Pretty dull-sounding stuff. But for anyone interested in royalties, rights or protecting copyright, it’s a revolutionary development, said Macdonald, and in an age in which piracy and the production of content are proliferating, one that has been long in coming.

‘If you have a catalogue or a library, the existing system we have for tracking these properties has always been a problem,’ she said.

As the system gets up and running in this country before the end of the year, Ellis believes users will find the number cheap and easy to attain.

And although participation is said to be voluntary, CAVCO certification cannot be processed without an ISAN number. More than that, the adoption of the ISAN standard promises to minimize both pirating and administrative costs in the payment of royalties.

Or, to put it in a producer’s language: ‘People will get paid more quickly and they will be paid more.’

For more information, go to ISAN.org or ISAN.ca.