Branding… Part 16…
I’ve Lost Track of The Numbers… A Branding Post…
I got a question a few days back that was basically “Why are you so down on trademark?”
Answer… “I am not.”
But I am down on the seemingly purposeful desire to not learn on the part of fiction writers about copyright and trademark. Now that I am down on. And I don’t think a month goes by when some writer thinking they want to control something they dug out of the public domain (where all writing comes from) by finding an attorney hungry for money willing to slap a trademark on the thing. Stupid meet greed.
Or worse yet, the writer goes to that Facebook ad about getting a Trademark in five minutes. Stupid meet scam.
So I am not hard at all on the IP aspects of trademarks. Kris and I control a lot of them of varied values and uses. I am always focused on building more brands and trademarks.
So why do so many, many. otherwise very smart writers just walk blindly through their business not thinking they need to learn copyright or trademark, even though it is IP that they are licensing to make money off their writing???
Here are three main reasons I have heard regularly…
- “I’ve been meaning to get to that.”
- “I understand enough for now.”
- “My writing isn’t making enough yet or have enough value yet to make that worth my time.”
And so on and so on… I just zone out.
So I said this is a branding post, right? So what is a brand?
At its core, a brand is a combination of copyright and trademark. A stew of the two.
A brand is a form of control to help you make more money from a product.
Copyright and trademark, in their basic forms, are control.
But if you don’t want to control your own work, then keep being willfully ignorant about IP. I am sure that plan will do well for you,
Not.
9 Comments
T Thorn Coyle
I’ll once again recommend the Bite-Size Copyright class. As a matter of fact, I need to get back to it and finish off the fourth quarter!
Watching the videos once a week makes it easy to learn, and sparked a ton of ideas about how to leverage my IP.
dwsmith
I think you might have hit on why so many writers don’t get around to learning copyright. They can not see a reason to do so. Yet the more you understand about copyright and trademark and branding, the more ideas you can come up with for making more money with your work. But you can’t see all that until you learn.
The idea of an open door. You have to learn how to open the door before you can step through into the amazing world on the other side.
It’s why I get so many blank looks when someone asks what our top income source is (thinking it is Amazon, which is down around 8th), I say Licensing.
T Thorn Coyle
Learning to open the door is exactly the thing!
Watching the copyright classes, it wasn’t so much anything you said specifically, it was that something unlocked in my brain. I’m going to make so much income over the next few years just from ideas sparked by that class (already am, actually). And I know I’ve only scratched the surface.
Learning is a major component in shifting our mindset. Now, we can get trapped in always taking classes and never *doing* too, but as long as there’s a balance over time, our thinking stays fresh and engaged. That is super helpful.
dwsmith
Exactly… Thanks!!
Brad D. Sibbersen
“Who are you? We never heard of your IP. But we’ll give you a one-time amount if you hand over ALL the rights.”
That’s been my experience, more often than not. Of course the correct answer to this is “No.”
There needs to be an online licencing expo, where creators and legitimate operators can interact and partner up to their mutal benefit.
dwsmith
Brad, there is and we met with the folks at the Licensing Expo this year. We will be testing it out this fall and I will report here on how it works.
Kate Pavelle
I second what Thorn wrote. Copyright isn’t hard, it’s just a system and we learn systems all the time. It does open doors. For me, it made me realize that we can’t use photos we paid for fir the first cookbook (licensed for just the first, geographically general cookie cookbook) in our second cookbook. Thus, we have been baking mini batches of recipes just so I can shoot them. This way we will control our IP.
The mistake I made before is that I didn’t insist on a written contract, which would have made it work for hire. Now she (who was a very nice boho yoga type person) can pull her permission to use these photos at any time even for the first cookbook, which would mean a serious loss of sales. I don’t read her as the kind of a person who would do that, but I don’t want to depend on my judgment from years ago. Fortunately, I ended up shooting over 50% od the photos in the old book. (Once we fix the errata, we will swap the photos for mine and issue a 2nd edition.)
At this point of formatting, since the second book focuses on the Mediterranean cookies, I had already shot all the new entries. We are redoing only the most strategic photos of the old entries and it’s not a big deal if we eliminate her images entirely. Not every recipe needs an image, only the most strategic ones, and we had issues with file size before. We’re in a better shape than I had feared!
I had realized my hazard only once I got through a certain portion of videos. I still have a bit to go before I finish.
So go and sign up for Bite-Sized Copyright.
C.E. Petit
Really “understanding” trademark begins with knowing its origin: Protecting the early-and-mid-1700s English upper class, and upper middle class putting on airs, from being ripped off by inferior-quality (sometimes even counterfeited) silverware produced by East End silversmiths. It was literally a mark; over on this side of the Pond, Paul Revere and his family had a famous mark at the time (and you’ve probably seen “Revereware” at some time). And because it was there to protect Important People, it was primarily enforced in criminal courts.
The key takeaway from the above is that trademark didn’t begin as a property right. It began as a consumer-protection statute, and evolved toward regulation of unfair competition (false designation of origin or quality) by those directly harmed by the unfair competition, who have property rights in either profiting from the competition or in avoiding fraudulent inducement. Copyright has in practice converged toward the same basis in the last century or so, marked largely by the rise of the motion picture. (I could go on for hours on this, but won’t.)
This is why copyright and trademark work together: Copyright concerns protecting the actual authorship of creative expression, and trademark concerns protecting the designation of origin and presumed quality of all goods including copies made of creative expression. Conversely, offensive use of copyright and trademark law is about attacking those colloquially called “pirates.” Everything else is just the third-greatest oxymoron, after “civil war” and “military intelligence”: “civil procedure” (trust me, there’s almost nothing “civil” about the maneuverings in unfair-competition disputes… having seen more of the BigLaw attorneys and entertainment-industry executives in action, I’m not certain they can spell that word).
dwsmith
Thanks, C.E…. That was fantastic and clear. Really appreciate it.