In case you missed it, I recently hosted a LinkedIn Live session (I host them every last Wednesday of the month😊) where I discussed the 360 degrees of trouble you can get in if you hire contractors without a written agreement. The unintentional collaborator is your nightmare come true.

The copyright owner of content has the exclusive rights to reproduce, adapt, publicly distribute, publicly perform, and publicly display the work, or authorize others to engage in these activities.

You have a service in high demand. You have neither the will nor the desire to work more or hire or manage additional employees. You are confident that the transformation you provide to your clients could be effectively delivered by other experts to their clients if they used the methodology and materials you have developed.

Thinking about turning your expertise into a licensing program, but concerned that it isn’t a fit for your highly customized, non-recurring professional services that you are known for and that your clients demand? If so, you are correct.

There are many rewards—and challenges—to licensing your expertise.

Thinking about how to protect your IP when collaborating with a colleague?

Let’s look at an example:

Two people collaborate to create an illustrated children’s book. One provides the text. The other provides the illustrations.

Does each collaborator own 50% of the book?

Last week’s newsletter struck a chord. As experts, we have all been victims of someone “borrowing”, aka stealing, our work. We don’t want to be that bad guy.

Copyright law provides the owner of the copyright in a work—

Let’s practice the Golden Rule of Copyright.

Do onto others as you would have them do onto you. That means it is our duty to make sure we don’t intentionally or accidentally infringe someone else’s copyrights.

Everyone wants to know how to license their intellectual property. Completely ignoring the fact that they are already licensing their IP to their clients.