Direct Talk

You may not Own your Logo Last week we talked about avoiding right-clicking and impermissible copying. Once you hire someone to create artwork for your business, you want to make sure you own the rights to that artwork at the end of the day. Many business owners assume if they hire a photographer, graphic artist, website developer or ghost writer that they own the rights in the resulting work. You know what happens when you assume! If your employee creates the work for you,

Don’t Right-Click You are sending a weekly newsletter to potential customers and you need some fun summer artwork to perk it up. You head to the local library and find a glossy gardening book and cut out a beautiful picture of a rehabilitated arbor in full bloom to use in your newsletter. You would never do this, right? You are horrified at the thought of defacing the glossy gardening book and stealing a picture. Yet many people wouldn’t think twice about right-clicking on

Your Idea alone cannot be Protected An entrepreneur calls me with a new way to code medical claims and wants me to “copyright” their business. They get agitated when I tell them their business idea is hard to protect, and they can’t copyright an idea. Copyright protects “original works of human authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression.” This means copyright law protects the author’s individual expression of an idea, and not the idea itself. That is why there ar