Protecting Your Ideas on a Budget
The birth of a company and the idea that fuels it can come at any time. If entrepreneurs waited until the conditions were ideal to start a business, many of the brands that we’ve come to know and rely on may never have gotten off the ground. Often early-stage businesses are run on shoestring budgets, trying to stretch every dollar as far as it can go.
Use Signed Contracts and Agreements to Protect Your Company, Part 1
The early days of a business are a hectic time for any entrepreneur. Almost all of your time and energy is spent trying to get your business off the ground, often by yourself. Your worries tend towards the basics of keeping the lights on as well as figuring out how to grow. But as your business starts to develop and move beyond these early stages, you will start to run into new challenges and new areas of concern. As new opportunities present themselves, so will new risks that need to be mitigated. Taking the proper precautions to address that risk can help you feel secure in the future of your company while you continue to grow.
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Use Signed Contracts and Agreements to Protect Your Company, Part 2
This is the second part of the series. Read part one here.
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Major League Baseball Faces Patent Infringement, Trade Secret Theft Lawsuit
Technology is an increasingly important part of sports, not only in the playing of the games themselves, but in how people are consuming them. Fans have an appetite for more and more information about the action in the games they’re watching, especially in the statistics-heavy world of baseball. Major League Baseball has invested heavily in tools that allow teams and fans alike to measure every action on the field, but a recent lawsuit is claiming that some of the developments might be ill-gotten.
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Intellectual Property and the Challenges of Technology, Part One
Technology has given us more access to available information and an incredible ability to disseminate our own messages. The internet allows us to see stories and pictures and videos from all over the world from the comfort of our devices, and the phone in our pocket can capture our experiences with high quality pictures and videos. And while the ability to find and share content on a global level is definitely a net positive, it can present its own challenges for creators and entrepreneurs.
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Intellectual Property and the Challenges of Technology, Part Two
Romance Novelist Turns Trademark Troll
We may look at the romance novels we see at supermarkets or airport shops as something of a joke, with overwrought titles and lascivious covers. But romance novels are a big business; according to the Romance Writers of America website, romance novels account for over $1 billion in sales and make up 34% of the fiction market. For successful authors, there’s a good living to be made in writing romance fiction, or, in the case of one writer, potential money to be made in aggressively pursuing trademark lawsuits.
Copyright Lawsuit Against HBO Dismissed
Television can be fertile ground for copyright lawsuits, given the amount of creative work that goes into producing a single episode of original programming, to say nothing of the hundreds of scripted programs that now exist across the largest number of channels and streaming platforms that have ever existed in the history of the medium. But not all lawsuits are the same, and not every case is an example of an entertainment company taking advantage of a creator (though those undoubtedly exist in substantial numbers.)
Using Creative Works to Grow Your Business
We devote a lot of writing in this space to the issues and concerns of small businesses and startups, but there is an entire subset of professionals that are part of the business ecosystem that is often forgotten, and that is the independent artists and creators that can produce the work that are often needed to fill in the gaps for growing companies.
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