Welcome back to our series on Creative Smarts, copyright strategies and tip to protect your work! Here are the remaining six strategies to protect your intellectual property as a creative. Like the previous half, you’ll want to prioritize the strategies and tips that are most relevant to your industry, where you are in your career, and where you can save or protect the most money! Check out Part I here!
1. Advertise The Availability of Licenses
One great way to make the most out of your copyrights is to advertise the availability of licenses in high visibility places. It’s one action with two values. It both signals that your works are available for a fee (or other conditions) and that you as the owner are actively protecting your copyrights. Use plain language or a method that suits your style and let people know that your copyrights are open for business. No one will ever mistake you for someone who hasn’t protected their work(s). Also, remember that as the copyright owner, you can license your work for however much you want, and can deny licenses for moral or arbitrary reasons. You can grant licenses for single uses or percentages of the licensee's revenues (also known as royalties).
Advertise Your Licenses Tips
1. Create a brief FAQ that mentions your copyright ownership and licensing availability.
2. Post your no-licensing criteria in plain sight to reduce unwanted inquiries.
3. Embed a license inquiry form directly on to your website.
2. Register Your Copyrights
Copyright protection attaches or “fixes” at the moment of creation. You enjoy federal protection whether or not you’ve registered your work, a nice feature of copyright law. Registering your work does provide its advantages though. Most importantly, it serves as “prima facie” (upon first sight) evidence of copyright ownership switching the burden of proof to prove the infringement in court to the other party. This makes their job just that much harder. On the offensive side, you can't even bring an infringement suit unless you've already registered and been granted a copyright in that work. This reduces the likelihood of frivolous suits. Registration within 90 days of publication also increases the availability of statutory damages (i.e. higher money awards) if you succeed in suing an infringer. Most people can handle standard registrations on their own, which can be submitted digitally at the U.S. Copyright Office’s website.
Register Your Copyrights Tips
1. Register unpublished works in groups to enjoy registration at a fraction of the cost!
3. Create standard routines in your creative process for registering your works.
3. Learn the Basics of IP Law!
Learning the basics of intellectual property law is a great way to help protect your works now and inti the future! As you become more educated on the subject matter, you’ll start to view your own intellectual property in a whole new light. You’ll begin to understand how your intellectual property is created and protected under the law. You’ll also begin to appreciate intellectual property more through other fields, which can be fascinating, especially in the world of technology. Learning from the mistakes of others is a surefire way to avoid making those mistakes yourself. Every few years the Supreme Court also hands down a ruling that has a major impact on intellectual property. For example, the Google LLC v. Oracle America (2021) decision recently drew the line for fair use exceptions of computer code. This means that in some cases the rights to certain structural computer code must be available to everyone. Effectively, there are certain codes that can't be protected because doing so would be too prohibitive to coders creating other programs. That is, it would stymie creativity and progress within the field, a foundational consideration in copyright law. It’s a landmark decision with huge implications for the fair use borrowing of computer code! While software coding might not be relevant to you, precepts of fair use and open source intellectual property probably are. Intellectual property lives on the edge of technology and innovation, so staying up-to-date provides for plenty of conversation starters.
Keep Up With IP Law Tips
1. Follow sources (like the Copyright Alliance) for updated news!
2. Attend a free webinar provided by a Lawyers for the Arts non-profit (VLAA).
3. Stay informed on new technologies that affect our everyday lives.
4. Use a Copyright Policy
Developing a clear copyright policy for your website sets the ground rules for its use, sharing, and licensing. Your policy can help set expectations, and even a short policy can be a remarkably clear and thorough way to provide information about your rights. As you continue to build your career and knowledge of intellectual property law, you can continue to fine tune your policy. If you collaborate with other artists or entrepreneurs, your copyright policy can also be a helpful boundary for your relationships as well.
Use a Copyright Policy Tips
2. Use simple and effective language so no one misinterprets your policy.
3. Gear policies towards personal experience and your industry’s most common issues.
5. Back, Back, Back It Up!
Everyone has had this nightmare. If you’re not backing up your work, you could lose it forever! Here’s my simple rule: if you use your computer exclusively for anything—word processing, photos, templates, illustrator files—you should be backing it up at least a few times a year, if not once month or week. Ask any performing artist, having a backup (and even a backup for your backup) is the only way to be entirely safe. It’s the same for your copyrights and other intellectual property!
Back, Back, Back It Up! Tips
1. Use the 3-2-1 system – three copies, two formats, one different place.
2. Schedule back-ups into your calendar throughout the year.
3. Use an encrypted cloud service as an additional storage option.
6. Advocate for Stronger Protections
We only get better intellectual property protection if there’s enough advocacy for stronger protections. This means constantly reminding ourselves that protecting intellectual property is of continued importance. As of this writing (late 2024), the New York Times is suing Microsoft’s ChatGPT over whether it can train its AI on millions of copyrighted works without authorization or compensation. Artificial intelligence presents both novel issues of authorship and novel ways to steal your mind and mental health through scams and deepfakes. U.S. intellectual property law seems due for some transformative changes in the next few years. You can help by being an advocate for stronger protections as artificial intelligence becomes our new way of life and the lines between humans and technology begin to blend. After all, your mind is your property!
Advocate for Stronger Protections Tip
1. Understand the impact of long-term exposure to technology and its algorithms.
2. Voice your support for various copyright and IP protection where you can.
3. Support continued efforts to legislate pro-copyright laws and policies.
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There you have it! Twelve strategies along with three tips each on how you can better protect and think about protecting your intellectual property. That’s thirty-six tips in total to pull from or incorporate into your career! The best advice I can give you is to pick the ones most important to you and most likely to turn into a regular habit. We are firm believers in helping creative businesses and individuals do all they can to protect their IP. It would bring us great satisfaction here at Zala Law, LLC if you incorporated just a few of these tips and strategies into your life!
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