What’s up, y’all. Welcome to The Shontavia Show, where my goal is to help you start a business based on your life’s vision. This ain’t gonna be your daddy’s business advice. I’m laser focused on entrepreneurship in the 21st century, vision and breaking the traditional mold. If you can get with that, you can get with me. Be sure to visit shontavia.com for more episodes, blog posts, and other content. Thank you for listening. The show starts now.

Hey everybody, this is Shontavia with the Shontavia show where I help you create a business based on the vision you have for your life. So I’m excited about this episode, which is about intellectual property. This is like my bread and butter. This is where I started. My first job when I graduated from law school was as an intellectual property lawyer, and intellectual property, the umbrella term for patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets, this is really where I cut my teeth and learned how to be a lawyer.

And I loved it because I got to work with inventors, with creators, with people who were excited. So, like, when I graduated from law school, a lot of my classmates were out arguing with people in court or dealing with really traumatic circumstances, involving like crimes and that kind of thing. And what I loved about what I got to do is that usually people weren’t angry with each other. Now obviously they were some times, but usually people were excited because they’d invented something, they’d created something. This was their baby. This was, you know, like the thing that they were really, really proud of and I was helping them figure out how to protect it. So I love working with creators and inventors even to this day for that reason.

And creators are constantly pushing boundaries and being disruptive in their industries, developing stuff the world has never seen and sharing their talents with folks in ways that they’ve never seen before. So I just really love working with people who create stuff.

But along those lines, what I found with people who create stuff, they’re so committed to creating stuff that they don’t always stop and assess the value of their work out in the world and how to immediately monetize it. And this is somewhat of a challenge because not everybody wants to monetize their work and that is 2000% fine. But for those people who would, if they only knew and understood how to do so, it can be pretty tragic when they’ve created something and then someone else goes out and uses it, makes a ton of money off of it or gets a ton of press or a ton of interest or whatever. And that original content creator is kind of stuck, not getting anything or holding the bag if you will.

They’ve done the hard work of creating the thing, but they don’t get any value or benefit of it.

So like if you’re familiar with the term on fleek, on fleek was created by a little girl on Twitter and she did not know or think about taking steps to put a brand around that term on fleek. And now you know, maybe it’s fallen a little bit out of popularity, but for a time the term on fleek was everywhere. Big companies were using it. Athletes, actresses, people with huge platforms were using that term, on fleek, and this young lady who actually invented the word, never really got to see the the monetary financial or platform value of doing that.

There’s even a lawsuit I heard about recently where Lizzo who has one of my favorite songs of 2019 has a song called Truth Hurts and there’s a line in that song where she says, “I just took a DNA test, found out I’m 100% that bitch.”

Like she got that line from a Twitter account, and the person who originally tweeted that line has been talking about for quite some time that, “Hey, I created that line, but I’m not getting any songwriter credit or any, you know, recognition for coming up with maybe one of the most popular lines in an R & B / hip hop song in 2019.” Although Lizzo came back around toward the end of 2019 and said she would give that person a songwriting credit.

But at any rate, the stuff that comes out of your brains, these assets that come out of your brains are oftentimes overlooked by entrepreneurs or they don’t think about it until it’s too late. And so this whole episode is about how to help creators think about their intellectual property assets, the stuff that they are creating and inventing before it’s too late.

Now, you may choose not to monetize your work and that is completely fine. There’s some cases where you won’t be able to monetize your work because the law says you can’t. That is completely fine. But what I want to do is just give you enough information so that you can make the right decision for you, for your brand, and for your business.

And again, this concept of intellectual property where some lawyers actually don’t like the word intellectual property because it’s a little bit of a misnomer. They just want us to say copyrights, trademarks, patents, trade secrets, whatever. The point is, if you’re creating stuff with your brain, there’s probably some law that helps you protect it so that you can figure out how to monetize and leverage it yourself.

So what is intellectual property? What can it include? And the answer is that it can include so many different things.

Your list of customers could be considered intellectual property. The stuff you post on social could be considered intellectual property, a catchy slogan, a logo, a jingle, a word you made up.

All of this stuff, the way you are selling yourself, your business. I guess I shouldn’t say selling yourself, though maybe that’s intellectual property too, but the way you’re selling products and services, your company, the way they show up in the marketplace, all that stuff could be considered intellectual property. This podcast I’m doing is intellectual property. Perhaps it’s that awesome book you wrote on Amazon or are selling on Amazon. That’s intellectual property.

So I now you don’t want to get bogged down in, like, the legal terms and the red tape and all of that, but some of this stuff is just necessary if you’re going to be in business, if you’re going to leverage the stuff you create, it is definitely worth your time to understand some of these principles and not only understand some of these principles, but develop a strategy around them and monetarily think about like just what’s the value of this stuff you’re creating?

Because if you’re like me, you have to be compensated to live, to eat, to survive. And so if the things that you’re creating can help you do that, this podcast hopefully will help you get it and understand.

So why is intellectual property important? Before we get to like the nuts and bolts of those four different types, I mentioned patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets, why is it important?

So first of all, intellectual property rights aren’t that important and valuable on their own. The value in intellectual property rights come from what you are willing to do with them. So just because you have a patent on something or a trademark for something or you get a copyright for a thing, that doesn’t mean anybody on this planet is not going to try to use stuff without your permission or copy your work without your permission. But the value is in your right to exclude people from doing that kind of stuff.

To be valuable, what you have to do is exercise those rights that you get through patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, that kind of thing. So you have to have some strategy.

Even if you get a patent, trademark, copyright or trade secret, you actually affirmatively will have to do something with those things when you see other people in the marketplace, uh, trying to use your work or copy your work without your permission. Without having a strategy, your intellectual property honestly is not valuable at all, it’s not worth whatever you even probably paid for it.

So the most valuable IP rights are those that you understand and are willing to build a strategy around. If you do that, what you will have is a very competitive advantage over your competitors in the marketplace. So that is really the real deal about IP. So I see these IP intellectual property, I see commercials all the time where, or like social media posts, I just saw some social media posts on Twitter about this, that said, Oh, if you get a trademark, then other people will not use your word anymore. And that’s not really the case at all. The value is in how you execute a strategy.

The other reason intellectual property is important is because it encourages innovation. It takes a ton of work to come up with a really unique idea or truly useful idea or to create a really amazing brand. And part of the incentive of doing that is you know that once you finish creating a thing, you will have the ability to capitalize on what you’ve created and keep other people at least for a certain period of time from doing the same thing. So with patents for example, which protect inventions, you can keep knockoffs off the market for a certain period of time so that you can capitalize on the benefit of your invention.

If you knew that you could do all this work and anybody could just come in the same day and take it, there could be people out there who might not invent anything anymore. They wouldn’t have the same incentive to do so.

So intellectual property also protects small businesses, in particular, because the small business is putting a ton of time, money and energy into creating a thing. So the small business creates something, gets a patent, a major corporation can’t come along and just snatch that thing and start doing it. The major corporation has to purchase the right to use that invention. And so we can facilitate and grow small businesses using intellectual property.

And it also can establish brand trust and awareness. When you spend a ton of time working to build a brand by developing content, by doing commercials, doing radio spots and all of that, the people who hear you, the people who are consuming your content, they trust you.

You’re creating a relationship with the people who are connecting with your work and who are resonating with the message that you have.

But if anybody could take your logo and slap it on whatever they’re making, then you don’t have the same value in that relationship.

And then probably what’s most important for some of you who are listening to this podcast right now, it can help you secure secondary revenue streams. So if you invent something, it’s valuable to you. And maybe you can make and sell a thousand widgets or whatever it is you’ve invented. But one of the real values, if you don’t have a huge manufacturing operation, is you can license your technology to other people. Having adn owning your intellectual property allows you to give permission to other people through something called a license. A license is basically a contract that says, “yes, you can use and make the intellectual property that I have, but you have to pay me X, Y, Z dollars for the right to do that.”

So even with all of these benefits, some people never even take these steps to protect their intellectual property. It is very intimidating. It can also be really, really expensive. But it’s important to think about some of these things for the reasons I just mentioned.

And then too, for those of you who are seeking funding or who will be seeking funding, oftentimes whoever’s funding your company, whoever wants to invest in your company, wants to know you have intellectual property as an asset that can be used to grow and support your business.

So I, I know I spent a ton of time talking about that, but I think sometimes people don’t really understand why they even want a patent or copyright or trademark. But seeing that value is, is critical. In fact, there was a time, maybe 20 years ago, I was reading a magazine article and the president of one of Oprah Winfrey’s companies said ultimately at the end of the day, Oprah’s company, which is called Harpo Incorporated, it’s an intellectual property company.

So some of us might think about Oprah Winfrey and think about her as an entertainment mogul or as a talk show host or whatever. But the president of her company said, no. Ultimately this company is an intellectual property company.

So, talked about the importance of intellectual property, but what is it? So let me talk a little bit about what the different types of intellectual property are and then give you some suggestions on how you can find intellectual property in your own business.

So the first type of IP that I mentioned is copyrights. Copyright law protects tangible, original works that includes stuff like art, poetry, books, movies, songs, radio shows, podcasts, computer software, videos, components of architecture, even choreography, some components of a website are even copyrightable. And with copyrights, your copyright protection occurs automatically as soon as you finish creating a work.

And most people don’t actually recognize that. But the moment you finish creating something, you can put the little “c” with the circle around it on your work. You have a protected copyrightable work and I actually recommend doing that. Once a piece of work has been created, put the little “c” with the circle around it, put your company’s name and the year, and do that just so that you signal to other people that you are establishing a claim of copyright ownership in a thing.

You don’t have to do that and even if you don’t, copyright protection happens automatically, but that way you signal to other people that you believe you own it. Now what I didn’t mention is registration.

There are a number of numerous benefits to registering your copyright with in the United States, at least the US Copyright Office. I won’t delve into those right now too much, but do know there’s some real benefits to registering your copyrighted work that you should understand and appreciate.

But do know even if you don’t go ahead and register your copyright, you automatically get some amount of copyright protection for your work. So that’s the first type. So that’s copyrights.

The second type of intellectual property that I mentioned is trademarks. And what trademark law protects are words, phrases, symbols, designations, that you use in the marketplace to distinguish your products in the marketplace from your competitors, from other companies.

This might be a logo, it might be a word or a group of words. It might even be a color, a scent, a sound, a motion Think, for example, of like Nike’s Nike symbol or think of the Apple logo for laptops and phones. With respect to trademarks, your objective is to have customers recognize your trademarks as the source of quality for your products.

You want customers to see your logo, think about your company and recognize that there’s quality or value in it.

So the trademarks you choose might have limited value at their inception because you don’t have any customers yet. So the real value in the trademark is when there’s customer recognition of the value of your brand and trademarks can be important for your business. A lot of people think patents are really kind of like the creme de la creme of intellectual property and in some instances they may be that. But trademarks are important because if you can’t use your name, if you can’t use that brand name, that brand recognition, how are you going to sell your stuff?

So would it be harmful if somebody else take your name, if it would be harmful, if somebody else took the name, took the words, took the logo and all of that, then it’s important for you to think about a trademark strategy for your business and your brand.

The third type of intellectual property is a patent. And a patent in its most simplest form is a contract between an inventor and the government, at least in the United States. What patent law protects is inventions and in particular inventions that are new, useful, non-obvious and that fit into one of the categories articulated by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

And so the law in the United States through the United States Patent and Trademark Office is there certain types of things that can be patented — processes, machines, something called an article of manufacture, a composition of matter, or improvements, new and useful improvements, of any of the stuff I just mentioned. Patents can be pretty expensive in the United States and this is one reason they can be pretty intimidating for people because they cost a lot of money and take a lot of time to get. But in United States, particularly with startup companies who are looking for venture capital funding and looking for investors, it can be important to either have patents if you’ve invented something or you’re selling some new widget or new invention, or if you are not pursuing patent protection, being able to explain and articulate why you don’t have that patent.

And this is, you know, something that’s been around for a long time. Intellectual property in the United States is as old as the United States. The intellectual property clause in the Constitution was one of the first things written by the folks who wrote the United States Constitution.

So, so these different types of intellectual property at least, alright, so patents and copyrights are implicitly written into the Constitution. Trademarks, not so much, but at any rate, all this stuff, all this intellectual property is something that we, at least in the US consider very, very valuable and US intellectual property law has been adopted all over the world. So a lot of the principles that I’m mentioning here today, they apply in some fashion or form in other countries around the world. Though the law may be a little bit different depending on where you are.

The final thing I’d like to mention briefly are trade secrets. Trade secrets are treated a little bit different in the IP field and I don’t really know why that is because they are also very, very valuable in the grand scheme of things for entrepreneurs in particular and startup companies. And that is because trade secrets encompass confidential stuff, confidential information that is valuable because it is confidential or secret.

Think of like the recipe for Coca-Cola’s beverages or the recipe for KFC’s fried chicken. That kind of stuff is important because nobody else can really make it. You can try to reverse engineer lots of things, but the value, at least part of the value comes from not being able to recreate the thing. So it could be formulas, it could be customer lists, that could be patterns, compilations, the way you make something, the way you create any types of things.

If you have certain price books for things, all that stuff could be considered trade secret. And used right, trade secrets and the other forms of intellectual property can add a ton of value to your business.

So think of it this way–if a competitor started to use the things you’re using, would it be harmful to your business in some way? If it would be harmful to your business in some way you might think about whether or not it’s protectable using intellectual property law. Not all types of IP are appropriate for all types of businesses. And I would never suggest that you pursue some type of IP that has no value in your business at all.

So how do you know if something’s valuable for your business or not? I think you should ask that first question I just mentioned a minute ago. Would it be harmful to me if a competitor started to use this or copy this and if it would be, consider using IP to protect it.

How do you know if you have IP?

Number one, what types of things have you created and written down or typed somewhere? What types of original things have you created?

Number two, how do you connect with your customers?

How do you distinguish yourself in the marketplace from your competitors?

Have you invented something that is new, useful, that is not an obvious thing. Something that is new and useful that you haven’t seen in the marketplace anywhere. Though keep in mind, just because you haven’t seen something doesn’t mean there’s not a patent out there for that, that hasn’t been invented yet, but at any rate, these are good starting points.

Are there secret things that give you an advantage over others. If you can answer yes to any of those questions, you probably have some intellectual property that you should consider. Yeah.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Shontavia Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to like, subscribe and leave a comment wherever you’re listening. You can find me on social media everywhere, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and wherever else @ShontaviaJEsq. You can also visit me at shontavia.com to find a transcript of this episode along with other show notes. While you’re there, please be sure to subscribe to my email newsletter.

The information shared in this podcast and through my other platforms is designed to educate you about business and entrepreneurship and I love to do this work. While I am a lawyer, though, the information I provide is not legal advice and does not create or constitute an attorney client relationship.

The Shontavia Show is a LVRG Incorporated original. The show is recorded on site in South Carolina and produced at Sit N Spin Studio in Greenville, South Carolina. Original music and sound design is by Matt Morgan and Daniel Gregory. Mixing and mastering is by Daniel Gregory and the video is by GVL Media.