by eclewis | Jul 26, 2011 | Business News, IP Law
The Largest Trademark Infringement Case Ever
In a recent article on Yahoo, it was reported that trademark and copyright infringement was taken to a new level in China. While it has been common knowledge that China does not diligently enforce intellectual property rights, the fact that it lets a full store be created is almost humorous. This isn’t a copy of the newest DVD or a purse. This is an entire store – as described in the article, it is a store that appears to be an Apple Store in ever aspect. It has the white paint, the Apple logo, macs and iPads (whether legitimate ones is a question). Minus, of course, that it isn’t owned by Apple. It even has employees, who wear the blue shirts and Apple-like employee badges, who stated they thought they were working for Apple.
As intellectual property becomes more valuable – whether it is in the form of software, pictures, websites, or the look and feel of a store – companies are working harder to protect it. In the United States, to enforce intellectual property rights usually starts with a cease and desist letter. In the cases where this doesn’t work, courts will hear the case and judge appropriately. However, what do you do with a country that has no enforcement?
In order to become part of the larger picture, China is going to have to start enforcing intellectual property rights or it is going to remain the stepchild of the IP world. Why would a company want to enter into a country where its very identity could be easily stolen? Let this article serve as a warning to any company that is looking to do international business with countries that are lax in their enforcement.
If you have questions about your rights in intellectual property or want to trademark or copyright your newest creations, contact Elizabeth Lewis your Denver business lawyer today at 720-258-6647.
by eclewis | Jul 18, 2011 | Business News, Random Thoughts
The following is a guest post by Kevin Cullis. For more information on Kevin, including his blog on all things business and Mac, please visit his site at www.macstartup.com.
Any business requires certain elements and steps to get off the ground: business planning, project planning, marketing, sales, finance, and business operations, each element designed in a system to be effective at satisfying a customer and then efficient with the results of being profitable. The most opportune steps to getting to the point of finding a Mac solution is primarily to determine the business case, process, or pain point and then secondarily finding a Mac solution. What a typical startup business owner does is have the tendency to jump to the Mac solution before clearly defining the important business reasons for needing a solution or even spending the money.
For example, when I was writing my book How to Start a Business: Mac Version almost every editor, graphic artist, or book expert stated that I needed to do my book in Adobe’s InDesign or Quark’s QuarkXpress, both cost $700 for a single software license. I could not afford them nor did I want to. I decided early on to see if iWork Pages, Apple’s $80 office suite, could do the job. One important aspect that needed to be answered was about leading (rhymes with heading), line spacing measured in points, not the typical single or double spacing we’re all accustomed to using. Once I learned that Pages could do “12 on 14” leading, 12 point font size with 14 point spacing for book design, I catapulted my book’s PDF off to the printer for my proof copy. It worked! As my grandfather used to say, “Pay enough to get the job done,” and Pages was “good enough” for the job I needed, I could now redeploy my $620 in financial savings toward something else.
Once you’ve defined the business elements and components that go into starting a business, and necessarily the intended size and quality of the business requirements, now it’s time to determine what Mac solutions and cool tools are needed.
- Marketing. Free with every Mac is Apple’s iLife, made up of GarageBand (music and audio recording), iPhoto (photo management and editing), iMovie (video, and can combine both audio and photos), iDVD (sharing of digital files), and iWeb (designing simple web sites). Beyond iLife, a startup mostly needs a copy of the iWork office suite made up of Pages (word processing and page layout), Numbers (spreadsheet), and Keynote (presentation) software to handle nearly all of a startups business marketing needs (print, audio, video).
- Sales. Moving into sales, the software needs may include: contact management (Apple’s Address Book or Zoho), To Do (Apple’s iCal or Omnifocus), calendar (iCal or Google Calendar), and sales or Point Of Sale (POS) software solutions (Xsilva or POSIM).
- Operations. The last pieces of heavy software needed may be financial or accounting (Moneywell or Quicken for Mac), graphics (Lineform or Pixelmator), project planning (Things or FastTrack Schedule), or databases (Bento and Filemaker Pro). At the tail end of the solutions are smaller utilities or applications that make life a little easier that are too numerous to list.
As with any startup the key issue of any Mac solution boils down to: quantity and quality. From a quantity perspective, how many clients or customers will you have and how many products, services, or transactions will you have? 500? 5,000? 50,000? These anticipated numbers will narrow down the field of Mac solutions as you consider their capabilities for your specific situation. The quality perspective will also play into who your ideal clients are. Will iWork Pages be good enough as a startup solution, or as a graphic artist will only InDesign be worthy of your talents and outputs. Or as a dog sitter could using iWork Numbers versus Quicken for Mac be good enough to balance your checkbook? You don’t always needs to best solution to get the job done.
And as for whether you can start a business with a Mac – Survey says: Yes! A Mac can be used by just about any startup. As tickets to the 2011 World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) sold out in two hours and Apple continues to sell progressively more Macs to businesses, growth in solutions for businesses will continue. This suggests that businesses will increasingly be attracted to the Mac as the platform of choice now and into the future as more and better solutions become available.
Before I left Startup Weekend, I had a chance to discuss the various startup teams and what they were working on with a judge. As an entrepreneur myself, I mentioned “too bad they couldn’t make any sales over the weekend,” whereas the judge stated, “The one that makes the most profits, wins!” Profits only follow providing a great product or service, and the Mac does everything to save you time and money while getting it done. So, just do it using a Mac.
If you need legal help starting a business, please contact me, your Denver small business attorney, Elizabeth Lewis.
by eclewis | Jul 11, 2011 | Business News, Random Thoughts
The following is a guest post by Kevin Cullis. For more information on Kevin, including his blog on all things business and Mac, please visit his site at www.macstartup.com.
I attended Startup Weekend June 3-5, 2011 in Denver. Startup Weekend is a 54-hour long event that starts Friday evening and ends Sunday evening having hacked out a business plan and pitched your idea to judges to determine the weekend winners. It involves all types of people: coders, marketers, people with an idea, or startup wannabes, a whole mixture of individuals. One of the interesting observations during the event was how many PCs and Macs were in attendance, so the question becomes: Can a startup use a Mac? The Startup Weekend Mac to PC attendance ratio at this one was about 2:1. So, do ya think just maybe?
As in any startup, there are two aspects of a business: the craft of a business (writing, law, medicine, mechanic, dog grooming) and then there is the business of the craft (making a profit in those crafts using Mac tools). There is a general misconception among PC users that Macs are “mainly for graphic artists,” and only a small number of businesses can use them.
Having worked with thousands of businesses selling computers in my career, I can emphatically say that the average startup, mompreneur, or small business can use a Mac in a nanosecond. There is only the small chance that using a Mac may restrict a business, but it mostly occurs with industry specific solutions, for example architectural, accounting, or medical applications that may not have some of the bells and whistles as a Windows version. In most cases, there are workarounds for niche software, but in most cases, it is not a showstopper, more of an inconvenience to the Mac user.
Stay tuned for next week’s conclusion of “Starting a Business – the Mac Version”. And until then, if you need legal help starting a business, please contact me, your Denver small business attorney, Elizabeth Lewis.
by eclewis | Jun 30, 2011 | Business News, IP Law, Online/Social Media Law
Monday we talked about how copyright infringement is more public now than twenty years ago. It is also my opinion that part of the issues is that those who have grown up with the Internet don’t see copyright infringement as that big of a deal. Napster, eDonkey, Gnutella, and other sites were the first in a wave of being able to share copyrighted music and movies with not only those that lived in your neighborhood, but those who lived in another country. Youngsters (and even older folks) would just download songs from these sites without thinking twice about the fact they were committing copyright infringement. A whole generation has grown up where “borrowing” and “sharing” are the new terms for copyright infringement.
In addition to being able to easily commit copyright infringement, I think more people (especially those that are younger) don’t see music, videos, or other things as something that can be “owned”. When I was a kid, you had to buy content. When a band came out with a new album, you had to purchase the album to all of the songs on it. Only a few were played over the radio. To watch the videos, you had to have cable to get MTV (back when it played music videos that is). To get a book, you had to buy the book or borrow it from a friend who had bought it (many times fair use, which is another discussion) – to copy it on a printer was not worth the time and money that it took, in most cases you could buy the book cheaper than copying it.
However, with the advent of the internet, that all changed. All of sudden, you did not have to pay a cable bill to see the newest music video – you just went online. You did not have to make a mixed tape in your basement – you did it with a few clicks of a mouse. As a business owner, if I “borrow” something a business owner has written in a far away state, it no longer goes to 1,000 people in my metro area which the likelihood of that business owner knowing I even borrowed means they has to know one of those thousand of people here, but is put on my blog which may have a readership in every major city in the U.S., not to mention available by Google search.
Many people think that because it is online that it has been shared with the world and that the rights of the author have been given up. Of course, as we business attorneys know, that isn’t the case. People keep rights to works even if they distribute them online. They don’t give up rights just because they have published something online. However, as more people grow up online it may be that the laws will need to catch up to the change in society.
If you have questions about whether a work you have found online can be used on your site, contact your Denver small business attorney, Elizabeth Lewis today at 720-258-6647 or Elizabeth.Lewis at eclewis.com.
by eclewis | Jun 27, 2011 | Business News, IP Law, Online/Social Media Law
On Friday, June 17, 2011, I was invited to be part of the conversation at the Social Marketing for Business Meetup. One of the questions I was asked as part of this conversation was why is copyright infringement seem to be so much more prevalent now than before the advent of the internet. In my opinion, the answer is twofold. First, it is easier to infringe on someone’s copyright today in public view than it was 20 years ago. Second, it is more acceptable among younger generations to infringe on someone’s copyright.
In regards to the first point, even twenty years ago copyright infringement occurred. A teenage boy trying to woo a teenage girl would create a mixed tape of her favorite songs – I highly doubt more than 2 boys twenty years ago got permission to do these mixed tapes (although I have nothing to back this claim up, it is just an instinct). People would use two VCRs to copy one videotaped (and copyrighted) movie to a blank tape. Bars would play copyrighted music into the night without paying royalty rights. Copyright infringement occurred twenty years ago – it just wasn’t as visible as it now – or as detectible.
Twenty years ago, it would be hard to for the general public to learn that a forlorn teenage boy had made a mixed tape to get the girl he loved to go to prom with him. Today, a 2011 version of that forlorn boy posts a musical stream to the girl he loves on his blog and within a few days, it is the stuff of legends on Comedy Central. The posting of a single photo online can end up on a thousand sites by the end of the day. And with tools like Google Alerts, the owner of an authored work can have digests sent to them of posts using a similar sentence.
Twenty years ago, copyright infringement occurred in small doses behind walls and out of public view. It happened – don’t get me wrong. However, it wasn’t happening online for hundreds, or millions, to see. The Internet and other modern technological devices like the iPod and computer make copyright infringement easy and something that can be done in public view.
Stay tuned for Thursday’s post on how society’s view of copyright infringement is changing. Until then, if you have questions about whether you may have infringing materials on your website or any other questions about your business, contact your Denver business lawyer, Elizabeth Lewis today at 720-258-6647 or Elizabeth.Lewis at eclewis.com.
by eclewis | Jun 23, 2011 | Business News, IP Law, Online/Social Media Law
Whenever I give a talk on online marketing law, social media law, or intellectual property law, the first question I try to answer (and many times am asked), is exactly what is a copyright? The U.S. Copyright Office describes copyright as “a form of protection grounded in the U.S. Constitution and granted by law for original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression” covering both published and unpublished works. To be more specific, copyrights typically cover artistic works such as drawings, literature, paintings, and photos. When looking at the online world, it covers areas such as blog postings, music, photos, software, website content, and videos.
To get a copyright, one only has to put the idea to paper (or in our modern age, on your computer, laptop, iPad, etc) – for instance, as soon as I wrote down this blog post, I had a copyright in this blog post. The picture attached to it is one that I took – and I received a copyright in that photo as soon as I took it. I did not have to register anything, I did not have to pay anything for the copyright, I did not have to do anything except have the idea and put it in a tangible form (i.e. take the photo, write the blog post, sing the song). However, in many cases, I may want to register the copyright to gain additional rights in the work and to help prove the work is mine.
To register a work that I have created, I have to file with the U.S. Copyright Office. Depending on what I am registering, I may have different forms or different filing costs. In most cases, it costs around $35.00 (although the fees may be more) and can be done online. Once I have registered my work (for instance lets say, this blog post), I have additional statutory damages I can claim. That means that if someone uses my blog post without permission (aka commits copyright infringement), I can get higher damages in a court case than I could if the work was not registered. In addition, in many cases, I am entitled to attorney fees making my case my appealing to attorneys to take.
To summarize – a copyright is a right in an authored work that is put into some type of tangible form (a book, a photo, a video, a website). You get a copyright in the authored work as soon as you put it into tangible form – you do not need to register it to have a copyright. However, you may want to register it as it may be difficult to prove the work is yours (even if you send yourself a “Poor man’s copyright version”) if you do not register it and registration gives you rights to additional damages.
If you have questions about whether a work you have created has a copyright on it or whether you should register the copyright, contact your Denver business attorney, Elizabeth Lewis today at 720-258-6647 or Elizabeth.Lewis at eclewis.com.
