23Nov The Entrepreneur Diet
Entrepreneurship is ripe ground for myth making. For example, to be successful, you have to be “born” an entrepreneur. That is unless, of course, you get lucky enough to be one of those “overnight” successes. Or, just possibly, you may strike gold by discovering the secret to “getting rich quick.” These kinds of fictions are convenient ways to explain the rising and falling fortunes of the world of business, and they’re harmless — except if you buy into them. Then they can become excuses for throwing in the towel on your business ambitions or, worse, not even trying in the first place.
22Nov Do I Need to Copyright and Trademark My Work?
Copyright and trademark are legal devises used to protect intangible intellectual property. What is intangible intellectual property? Intangible intellectual property encompasses all original content, such as text, graphics and sound. This article, for example, is a piece of intellectual property. Copyright law prevents readers from “stealing” it and passing it off as their own.
Trademark differs from copyright. Trademarks are created to safeguard what is identified as “branding,” which is a particular form of intellectual property. No matter how good of a chef you are, you cannot grill up some burgers, add some cheese, lettuce and tomatoes, and put up a sign calling your organization Burger King. Burger King, for greater or worse, is a name brand it’s a registered trademark protected under law.
No matter whether you ought to affirmatively copyright or trademark your work depends on the circumstances. In reality, original content is automatically protected by copyright law, regardless of whether you register it or not, regardless of whether you give others notice or not. Just by my writing it, this write-up is copyrighted.
21Nov The Balance Between Beat Making, Creativity & Copyright Law
Let me say straight off the high hat that creativity & copyright law do not make instant bedfellows! Within beat rap there is a tendency to sample, which is both quick & effortless, versus “copyright ownership” extremely focused on what may possibly constitute theft. The discussion can veer between litigation on the one hand and ignorance on the other. The simple problem is how to objectively measure how significantly of the remixed song “borrows” from the original.
1 of the existing stumbling blocks to licensing copyright (and therefore incentive to copy without having paying) is administrative overhead and price. Recording licenses can be obtained at a flat fee usually ranging from to over ,000. This is countered by royalties to recording owners of between .five cents and three cents per track sold. 15% of the original new work’s musical composition copyright might be assigned to the original author, and if extensive looping and reuse is employed, up to 66% may be allocated.