Navigating to the world of business is quite ambiguous. Not everyone has fully understood what it takes to grow the business and understand how intellectual property works. For many businesses, intellectual property secures more than just concepts or ideas; it also insures actual business assets, prevents unauthorized use of inventions, creations, and ideas, and grants one or more inventors exclusive rights.
Erin Austin, a consultant and a lawyer, will indulge us how the concept of intellectual property works and why it is important to understand it fully. She helps entrepreneurs to grow their business. Let’s dive in, and listen to her today!
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Intellectual Property Rights, Code and Implementations with Erin Austin
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, we’re going to talk about intellectual property. It’s a topic I think that a lot of people either overlook or don’t completely understand because it is a bit nebulous. Not everyone really understands when you come up with an idea or when you come up with a process, a product, even a logo or a company name, what it means to have that intellectual property, how that resonates with your business, and what you need to do to protect that for your business to operate properly. My guest today is all about intellectual property, Erin Austin. Her business is called Think Beyond IP and she helps anyone looking to grow their business to understand and navigate the world of intellectual property. And she also has a podcast called Hourly to Exit.
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Erin, welcome to the program.
Thank you so much. I’m very pleased to be here. Looking forward to this conversation.
Definitely. Thank you so much. I’ve wanted to talk with people about intellectual property for quite a while because it is something that people, they either overlook or don’t know how to wrap their heads around. What does intellectual property mean at its most basic level?
Great. So, first, I’m going to do my lawyer thing and I’m just going to say that what we’re going to talk about today is just information. There’s nuance to everything. Even if we talk about some examples, there’s always going to be something that’s different for everybody so we’re talking in generalities and if you do have specific questions, then you do need to consult with your own lawyer. With that out of the way.
Thanks for the caveat, there’s no one formula, you can just say, A plus B equals C, there’s always going to be something about your situation.
Absolutely, absolutely. Intellectual property, so, as you mentioned, there are four categories: copyright, trademarks, trade secrets, and patents. I will just say right off the top, patents is a very specific area of the law. I do not practice in it. We all are familiar with patents, probably. The pharmaceutical industry, obviously, they get patents on their medications and people who create inventions get patents on their inventions. I work with people in the expertise space and most of what their intellectual property would fall into the first three buckets: copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets. Copyrights are things that are original and that have been put down in some concrete form, which also could be digital, so when you write something down, when you paint a painting, when you take a photograph, when you shoot a film, when you create blueprints, those original expressions, once you put them down in whatever the concrete form is, the copyright, meaning the exclusive right to make copies, distribute, create derivatives of that material belongs to the copyright owner.
Trademarks denote the origin of a good or service. Share on X
So, whenever you see the trademarked golden arches of McDonald’s, you know that’s a McDonald’s. Whenever you see the trademarked brown color of a UPS truck, you know it’s a UPS truck. Whenever you see the swoosh of a Nike logo, you know it’s a Nike logo product. Those can be words, images, colors, even sounds. I think NBC — I don’t think they even use that anymore. I haven’t watched television in so long, I’m just aging myself right now.
Yeah. We all remember that, thum, thum, thum, yeah, whatever it is. Yeah.
And so that denotes like, “Okay, I’m on NBC because I hear…” And then trade secrets, unlike copyrights and trademarks which you do register, trade secrets have their value because you keep them confidential and so you do that by using your confidentiality agreements, either separate agreements or in your services agreements, and that you share it only on a case by case basis and examples of those would be the Coca-Cola formula, the KFC recipe, things that if other people learn about them, then the value of them immediately drops significantly and so those would be trade secrets.
So with a trade secret, is this a case where if you’re forming a partnership, you need to sign a nondisclosure agreement about it or does the trade secret registration already cover the fact that whoever is told the formula for Coca-Cola or the formula for how many onions you put on a McDonald’s burger or whatever already or they should know that they can’t share just by virtue of the fact that there is a trade secret register associated with it?
Yeah, so, first, trade secrets are the only form of intellectual property that you do not register because all registrations are public. So, when you register your book in the copyright office, you submit a sample of it so it’s all there. When you register your trademark, it’s in the trademark office so it’s right there. When you register a patent, you register the way to make it. So those things are publicly known. So, if it’s a trade secret that you don’t want anyone to know, because, I mean, at the end of the day, like let’s just take the Coca-Cola formula, which is a trade secret, I have no idea what it is but I’m guessing that if we knew the exact combination of materials, any of us could do it. So it’s not that complicated. I’m guessing it’s not that complicated, but it’s just that they’ve perfected it and it’s unique to them and so the value is making sure that people can’t copy it.
So these copyrights and trademarks are things that you register and when you register it with the public domain, you can have your legal protection around people copying it based on that registration, whereas a trade secret is something that you need to protect yourself through non-disclosure agreements or whichever other forms of privacy policies and I’m thinking about anyone that’s ever had a job where the first three weeks at work is all these like data security videos about how like we don’t even log on without a VPN to an unsecure network because someone might come in and steal that information.
Absolutely.
Trade secret is really it’s in your own hands almost completely, whereas the other ones, it seems like there’s a legal entity that knows, my example I often give is that there was one time I was going on a ski trip and I tried to make t-shirts that said “YOLO” on it and just to find out that that trademark had been claimed by Young Money Entertainment, aka Drake, which threw me for a loop. I was like, oh my gosh, like people were seeing YOLO before that song even came out, but I guess they were the first ones to trademark it and claim that intellectual property, because someone comes up with something, you’re talking with your friends and you come up with like a clever phrase, your first thought is not, “Oh, how do I trademark this phrase? How do I copyright whatever I did?” your first thought was, “Oh, I’m funny. I’m more popular now,” and blah, blah, blah and that’s it.
Right, right. That’s funny. So, yeah, so I’m going to try to back up to the first thing you said, which was regarding when you register trademarks and copyrights, they are publicly disclosed but they are in the public domain and I’m going to make the distinction because public domain basically means that there is not protections with respect to use of it. If I record Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, it is in the public domain, I don’t have to pay Beethoven’s heirs in order to use it because it’s passed into the public domain.
Yeah, that’s 75 years, I think it is.
Yeah. I mean, it keeps changing because Hollywood keeps pushing it out there. Mickey Mouse. Mickey can’t let Mickey Mouse go into the public domain. And I think he’s 100 years old now, I think.
Yeah, they keep pushing it to protect Disney’s whatever, but, yeah, so public registry, because publicly registered means that everyone knows that this is your intellectual property. The public domain is what it enters when it theoretically reaches that point, like Happy Birthday, like you don’t have to pay the person who wrote that song in 18-whatever every penny —
I don’t know that that’s true. I don’t know how old it is. Honestly, I don’t know if it’s that old, because I feel like there’s something that people commonly use that we’re all shocked to find out that it’s not in the public domain because we all just use it and it might be Happy Birthday but I’m just not sure. So it didn’t come from me that Happy Birthday is in the public domain, just saying.
Yeah, okay, cool.
So, yes, it is in your control to make sure you keep that trade secret.
Why it’s intellectual property is because the intellectual property laws protect and give a remedy in the event of an infringement. Share on X
So if someone copies your book and sells it under their name, then you have a remedy under intellectual property laws to sue them and get damages. If someone steals your trademark and starts settling the Louis Vuitton bags on the corner using your trademark, then you have a remedy. Or if someone steals your trade secrets and uses them, then you have a remedy under intellectual property law.
I guess the first step for anyone thinking about this topic is to understand what exactly is their intellectual property, whatever is the product you build, whatever is the logos, everything else. What’s a good way to wrap your head around when you’re looking around because there’s a lot of processes that are commonly used, such as agile development, the first thing that comes to mind. So many tech companies right now are using the framework of agile development in many different ways. Probably isn’t their intellectual property, even that most people just either took it from another job or read it in a book or something like that. So, what do you think people should be thinking about when they’re thinking about, “Okay, what qualifies as my intellectual property?”?
Well, it has to be original with you and so just a few rules about intellectual property ownership. We’re going to talk about copyrights here. Erin Austin Law, my firm Think Beyond IP, the brand that I do this work under, it says that if you have something at Think Beyond IP, Erin Austin created it or produced it or delivered it. I do not have a trademark, by the way, in it. We want to check to make sure that that is available so that there’ll be no conflict. So if you’re about to start a new business or offer a new product, then you do want to — and it’s going to be, assuming it’s going to be pretty valuable, you do want to make sure before you start spending a lot of money, you’re going to invest a lot of money in a brand, then you want to make sure that it’s clear so you don’t have to go back and change it later. But I’m going to assume we only have a few of those. I assume we don’t have like just trademarks laying around everywhere, so that’s going to be your business name and some logo and that’s going to be it, maybe the name of a service. So for your copyrights, though, I like to say that intellectual property is everywhere. I mean, think about it. Every time you write a blog post, every time you design a website for a client, every time you create a training for a client, every time you hire someone to do graphics for your website, intellectual property is flowing in and out of our businesses every day.
And I know this is an old number but, at some point, I want to say 10 years ago, the market value in the United States, 70 percent of it is intellectual property, that’s where the value is now. And so we are service-based businesses, which is who I primarily work with, the service-based businesses, like designers and consultants and coaches and trainers, that their intellectual property is being created all the time whenever they’re working for their clients, whenever they are a client, and I want people to think about that. Intellectual property doesn’t happen at some stage, like, “Oh, I’ve been in business for five years now, I’ve got IP.” You have IP the second you start creating anything. The way we make sure that we own it is, one, the owner is the human being who created it. I have a PLLC, I also have an employee. If I create something, I own it because I’m an employee of my business. But let’s say I have a contractor who creates something, so they’re not my W-2 employee, that person, that human being, owns it, even if I told them exactly what to do, even if I paid them for it. They own it unless there’s a contract in place that says I get the rights to it or if they are my W-2 employee. Those are the only exceptions where the human who created something doesn’t own it, which is why it’s so important to be mindful of where those rights are. Is the person who’s working for you a W-2 employee? If not, then you better have a contract in place if you want to own it.
If you don’t have a contract in place, the human who created it is the owner of that intellectual property. Share on X
The person who created it is the owner by default and there’s interesting discussion about the difference between a W-2 and a contract employee because we’ve all seen jobs somewhere where you have employees and then you have these consultants that come in or these contractors come in from a consulting firm and most people think about, okay, contractors, consultants, they’re people you can let go of a lot easier and employees is a lot more process, but, also, that these contractors, they own their intellectual property of anything created at work versus an employee. If you’re an employee of a company, the intellectual property of anything you do at work is the property of that corporation. Is that correct?
That is absolutely correct, yeah. So, when you’re a W-2 employee, the creator is legally the employer. The conversation about whether or not a contractor is just easier to get rid of and that’s a separate issue about whether or not we’re using contractors appropriately. Are they really employees or are they really contractors? That’s a whole employment law issue. But, yes, but — and that’s by state too, obviously. California has some pretty favorable provisions, laws so you definitely want to be mindful of that. But, yeah, so if you’re using contractors, thinking that they’re easy to let go of employees, you may have some issues with ownership of the IP that they’re creating because they really should be treating them arm’s length with contracts, that’s why they’re contractors.
Exactly. And so the other thing is that when someone protects the IP, obviously, you have the publicly registered trademark, patent, or copyright, but when no action is done, is it then the default outside of these contracts that the person who created it is the one who owns the intellectual property? And, in that case, does it oftentimes become some of these legal messes that you oftentimes see in the news about like, “Oh, well, who was the one that actually created this?” “I have a claim from 1984.” “Well, I have a claim from 1983. Look at my journal.” And some of these things that you sometimes see becoming big deals if these things actually become popular products or innovations.
Usually, if there’s a claim like that, someone is claiming, “Sony stole my IP,” they say that they’re no original idea and so someone’s written a screenplay, this is what I’ve seen a lot, someone’s written a screenplay, they know somebody like a cousin who’s at some studio, whatever, and then, lo and behold, that studio comes out with a film that has a similar storyline because there’s 10 of them.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, we can all think of like two films we know where like, “Yeah, that was the same story as this film before.” Yeah.
Exactly. Exactly. And so then Joe Screenwriter claims that the studio stole his screenplay somehow. That is a breach issue. The question would be, can you show that the studio really had access to your screenplay? Probably cousin had no ability to get it to anybody who could have read it. Almost every studio that I’m aware of has very strict policies about submission of screenplays, like they will not take a screenplay that doesn’t come from a lawyer or an agent, period. They won’t bring on some from someone’s cousin.
Otherwise, there’d be too many screenplays to look through because…
Yeah, I mean, there’s no shortage of screenplays. Yeah. Yeah, they don’t need your screenplay. And then did Joe Screenwriter even register it at the copyright office or has it just been sitting in his drawer, in his computer? Was there any reason to believe that anyone had access to — the fact that he, Joe Screenwriter didn’t register it wouldn’t, per se, mean that he couldn’t have a claim because if, in fact, he sent it to his cousin and his cousin is the Head of Development at said film studio, then maybe they really did steal it. And the fact that he hasn’t registered it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have a claim. He would need to register it to sue them. It’s not a matter of who registered it first because, unlike trademark, I would say this, like trademark, it’s first to file. So, YOLO, they got there first, you’re out. Whereas if I write my screenplay, I don’t register it in the copyright office but I wrote it and I sent it all over town and somebody steals it, the fact that they steal it and then copyright theirs before me doesn’t mean that they get ahead of me. I mean, it complicates things. It’d be much better if he copyrighted it so that’s why he would do it but it doesn’t mean that you’re out of luck.
Well, that’s interesting because, trademarks, obviously, you mentioned, tend to be words like YOLO or logos like the Nike swoosh, colors and pictures like the UPS truck, things like that, whereas copyrights are, if you create videos for a course that you’re designing online, that would fall into the copyright range and there’s a little bit of difference. So, when it comes to the copyright law, it seems like to overcome the burden of proof that something was stolen, it’s really not about who came up with the idea first but whether or not the person that you’re saying stole the idea had reasonable access or exposure to that to believe, “Okay, I told you this then you started implementing the idea,” and this is where it’s really messy. So, I’m guessing when it comes to copyright, whatever material you’ll put together, even the podcast that we record, generate, and publish, that the best thing to do is to copyright it as soon as it happens or have our companies, I know some of the podcast production companies I work with as well as some of the blog sites of people I work with have a feature in those particular services that protects that intellectual property through a copyright.
Interesting. So, for our podcasts, yes, you can register them and you can even, I was just looking at this this morning actually, about doing group registrations of your podcasts. But because we publish our podcast and, therefore, they’re publicly available, let’s say you don’t register your podcast but you publish it and so it’s documented, we know when you published it, when it was distributed, and then someone just steals it and slaps their own cover art on it and puts a new intro on it and says it’s them, you would not lose your protection just because you had not registered it.
That is really interesting. And now, you mentioned these patents being pretty expensive and I think I’ve heard stories about several to dozens of thousands of dollars to register a patent. What is the cost of copyright or a trademark being registered?
Just go to the copyright website, there, you can do everything online, like for a single, as I’m recalling, you have an article you want to register, I think it’s 45 bucks, and you can do bundles of them so there’s a whole schedule of fees on the copyright, but it’s not hundreds or thousands of dollars. It’s a couple hundred, maybe. For trademarks, I really do not believe that it is a DIY process. I mean, there’s a whole analysis of your trademark by the trademark office and they have a bunch of lawyers there who are going to look at your registration, look at your mark, look at the industry that it’s in, there’s categories of uses, like is it for education or is it for manufacturing or is it for real estate, and they’re going to look to see what the possibility of it being confusing with a currently registered trademark and they may have questions, they may reject it. This is something that’s going to be your brand, this is going to be very valuable for you, so to invest in a trademark lawyer to help you with that process I think is well worth it. And so there are providers that are online who can do it for like one registration I think as low as $1,500, if I’m remembering correctly. If you’re going to a lawyer at a law firm, it may be $3,500. And that will include guarantees, like, “Okay, if it gets kicked back, then I’ll keep working with you until we get it registered.”
You have to be monitoring them to see if anyone else is using them. It’s not just not a one and done thing. So just another benefit of using someone who’s it’s what they do all day every day is having a system for this.
Well, it seems like two different issues, because copyright is like the content that you create every day so there’s a much higher volume and you need it to be cheaper, whereas, like you said, a trademark could be your brand or images and I just imagine that movie Coming to America where there’s that McDowell’s restaurant that they’re always trying to figure out, okay, did they really copy the McDonald’s logo because it’s like the golden arches but like slightly curved a little bit more or something like that and that’s a situation where I imagine it would take some of these attorneys to really figure out like, “Okay, they’re called McDowell’s instead of McDonald’s. They’re still arches but they’re curved a little bit more. They have the big MC and the only difference is that the buns don’t have sesame seeds.” And I envision that that gray area comes up a lot more than people think with similar ideas.
Yeah, and as I understand it, it’s getting harder and harder to get things approved than it used to be, like talking about big Hollywood, I mean, that’s not a gray area what you just described, that would be no way, you stop, don’t ask, don’t get, because there are things called — I think they’re called super trademarks, and McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, like so you can’t even go near, don’t even play around with those because they’re just gonna get kicked out, forget about it, because, again, like if we go to the YOLO, I’m going to assume YOLO is not a super mark, so, YOLO, I’m going to assume that the category that it’s trademarked in is maybe music or, I don’t know, maybe apparel, I don’t know, whatever it might be, but I can do YOLO if I wanted to call my law firm YOLO. I’m betting that there’s no conflict between YOLO Law Services and YOLO hip hop apparel, whatever it is.
Yeah. Okay, that’s makes sense.
Yeah, but for super brands, like Coca-Cola doesn’t have a law firm but I could not call my law firm Coca-Cola Law Firm no matter what. It doesn’t matter if they are never ever, ever going to provide legal services, those super brands, you just can’t.
So it feels like the first step in any trademarking, which is similar to the first step in creating a name of a business, is to do a search and figure out if that’s already the name of a business because, otherwise, it could come back and bite you, like whatever you whatever you decide to name it, even if it’s an idea that you just came up with in your head independent of any awareness of this other firm with the same name, if they have it trademarked, they could legally say, because you mentioned trademarks are the ones that really are first come first serve unlike copyrights if it already exists.
And this is — we’re going a teeny bit into the weeds, so I’m going to do — only because it just came up with a local restaurant so I’m just thinking about this right now, is that restaurant, I’m in the Washington, DC, area, and they named the restaurant Born and Raised. Now, it’s a local restaurant but the chef has a national profile. He was on Top Chef, so he may want to expand that restaurant to other places and then they found out, oh, there is this chain of restaurants that’s in one state, I can’t remember what state it is, but just in that one state, this chain of restaurants that has the same name. And so they’re like, “You know what, before we start building this thing, let’s just change the name now so that if it comes down the line, that we’re just not gonna have any issues,” and that’s just also something to think about if you want to have a national profile with what you’re doing. Because you can’t have just a state trademark. That’s another reason to use a lawyer, because there could be someone has a trademark in their state because I’m a restaurant, I have no intention of ever leaving my state or having a national profile so I just get state trademark protection and so I don’t show up in the federal trademark registry. But, now, I come along and I want to do something with a national profile so I actually need to check all the state databases too.
With these trademarks, there’s enough like these like smaller complications between a trademark and a super trademark, between a trademark with a state, with a national level, and even other countries, if you want to go global, that it’s worthwhile to get an attorney, get someone who’s well-seasoned in all the specifics, all the details in that. It’s a good chance to ask you, if anyone here is interested in talking to you about Think Beyond IP, think about the service that you provide, anyone listening, what will be the best way anyone could get a hold of you?
Oh, well, you can find me a couple of places. One, I do have a podcast called Hourly to Exit and you can find it, I’m sure, where you find this podcast and also my website is thinkbeyondip.com and, there, you can sign up for my newsletter, which comes out weekly, and we talk about building a business from that unscalable hourly model to one that that’s scalable, where the business has some independence from the owner, and that, hopefully, you’ll be able to sell it someday.
Oh, so, yeah, bringing that business to the next level. Obviously, you’re actually starting to make the money you want to make and then, of course, eventually, the lifestyle that you want to achieve.
Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you want to get to the point where you are decoupling your income from your time, because, yeah.
Erin, what inspired you to start Think Beyond IP? What brought you to, “This is the business I wanna put together”?
Yeah, well, I spent a career working with very large corporations. Really, it was a time of life where you think about how can I work with a group of people who can help me achieve my goal to make an impact and believe the same things that I believe and want to see the same changes that I’d love to see made? How do I use my expertise to do that without completely shifting gears? And so when I thought about that, I thought about other service-based businesses like me, in particular, women-owned ones, that how do I make sure they understand the value in their businesses? A lot of us, we start our expertise-based businesses for lifestyle reasons, maybe we’re raising kids or things like that. And then, over the years, they grow and they grow but we’re not creating assets, we’re not truly capturing the value, because they’re good income earners. They generate income. But are we building assets so that when we’re ready to move on to the next challenge or to retire, that we have something that we could sell and, therefore, something that is a wealth builder? And so that is my mission to help service-based businesses, expertise-based businesses understand the real value in their businesses so that, if they want to sell them someday, that they can capture that value.
So it sounds like what you see is a lot of people leaving chips on the table, for lack of a better way to put it, in that they created something really good but they just don’t know how to turn it into an asset more than just, “I built myself a job essentially.”
Absolutely.
Many service-based providers don’t even think in terms of assets. Share on X
I mean, they think assets are their desktop and things like that. They don’t think about IP. I mean, at the beginning of this, we talked about how people have a hard time wrapping their head around IP and I think it’s because there is this perception that IP is a product, like it is software or it is a pharmaceutical or it is a computer, but it is that bundle of rights of things that you created and most times, those things are intangibles, like the training that we’ve created, like our proprietary process that we use to provide value to our clients, and the opportunity there is to create an asset that can be licensed instead of delivered in person, that you can train other people to deliver so you can expand and get your expertise out there without you having to work more. Yes, it could be a book. Yes, it could be a course too. But there are multiple ways to harness that intellectual property into a resource or a product that can generate revenue without you providing in-person services.
Well, to get a little bit deeper, it sounds like this is a whole new way of thinking about what makes you valuable as a person. Anyone listening out there, it’s like a whole way of envisioning this is your value, this is the value that you’re bringing to the world and this is why what you’re doing, what you’re thinking, what you’re saying, what you’re providing, what service, how you’re serving other people is valuable.
Absolutely. Yeah. I definitely want people to not think that their value is just in the time spent, in the transformation they’re providing to their clients and there’s multiple ways to do that. It can be through in-person services but it can also be through sharing your expertise through these other ways.
That’s amazing, because I’ve, for a long time, said that one of the things that happened when we mostly left the assembly line, the industrial world, into the service sector economy is that the value of your work is no longer perfectly correlated with the amount of time you put into it, the way it was on the assembly line and the work culture that we developed for most of the second half of the 20th century was based on this assembly line idea that this many hours meant this many units produced or this many units produced by your thing. But, now, we’ve seen in the service sector a lot of people spend a lot of time on things that are not very valuable and then quickly produce something really valuable in only a few hours’ worth of work, this time value thing becomes very muddled and I’m happy to see us rethinking that and thinking over value in a completely different way.
Yeah, I mean, just think about it, like the better you are at something, the more expert you are at something, the more quickly you can provide value to your client. That’s worth less?
Yeah, exactly.
And so, yeah, so that’s why hourly is not billing our time. Punishes the expert, yes.
And then you also talked about particularly working with women-owned businesses. This kind of framework, this frame of mind, something that women oftentimes experience more challenges with or is there some external factors that make it more challenging?
Yeah. Well, I do believe, and this is a generalization, that women have a desire generally to over deliver, under promise and over deliver. And I believe that if you have delivered the value, the transformation that the client has asked for, then that is the value, there’s no over delivery and, therefore, being under compensated. So, when we’re thinking in terms of what’s the transformation, what’s the value to the client, then we are truly valuing ourselves. We’re getting out of the hourly, “I am an external pair of hands” kind of mentality and that “I am the expert who can deliver this value to you.” And so when I work with women, there is some of that mindset stuff but more of it is making sure that they think about building a business that is separate from them in a way that feels more comfortable. Like the client just wants to deal with me. Well, the client wants the transformation and that could be with you or it could be with a team member, it could be another way. And so get the comfort that there are multiple ways that doesn’t involve you personally delivering the services. And also, and that building a business that you can sell some day isn’t some sort of betrayal. It’s not a betrayal, like let’s say you have a team, like if you build a business that can go on after you are ready for something else, then you get to make sure that your clients continue to be taken care of, that your employees continue to be taken care of, that whatever value that you’ve been bringing to the world continues to go without you. And I make the analogy to raise children.
Yeah, and I also love how in the beginning, we talked about some of these musical pieces, whether it be Happy Birthday or Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, 200 and change years later, that’s still a valuable piece of musical art, like the value of it is there and that’s similar to like the value of a home or the value of a farm or a piece of property. And so there’s an element of it, I’m guessing, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, of thinking about it in terms of like, okay, your intellectual property is a lot like these other things that we refer to as assets, that their value is still there until something else comes in and makes it less popular or more obsolete or something else in like the general process of human progress and evolution.
Intellectual property is absolutely an asset and it’s called an intangible one, but you can transfer it so it’s something that can be owned and can be sold and that makes it an asset. Unlike our services, like we can’t — only as an employee can we sell, like it has to be us, it can’t be transferred separately from us, our services, but intellectual property can be transferred separately from us. So, absolutely. And so, yes, and it continues to have value even when you sell it to the next owner, it continues to have value. It has value if you are lending it to somebody else to use in the form of a license. And so, if we use the real estate analogy, you can either sell your property or you can rent it, retain ownership of it and just rent it. So, there’s multiple ways to continue to get value from it and profit from it.
One final thing I want to ask you, because this podcast, in my tagline, we talk about mindset, the mindset that keeps you settling for less, and one thing I’m wondering is that is this understanding of our value, understanding that like what’s coming up inside our brain has value and there’s obviously the legal ways to protect it that you work on, but this understanding of value, is this a necessary transformation in mindset, in your view, to having someone accomplish eventually what you and I are both wanting to help people do, which is accomplish the lifestyle that they really want?
Yeah, I think it is a mindset issue and maybe it’s an education — one part education, one part mindset, but really for people to not be afraid of intellectual property because it’s — I’m trying to think of an analogy of something that you’re dealing with it every day anyway, you just don’t realize it so it’s not as mysterious as you think it is because it’s what you do all the time and getting comfortable with contracts.
Contracts don’t have to be intimidating. Share on X
Depending on who your clients may be, if you have Fortune 500 clients, they may send you 50-page contracts and so that that will happen. But also you can have your own version of contracts that are fairly simple that everyone can understand and think of those contracts as your friends because they’re basically like manuals for how you guys are going to work together so there are no surprises and there’s a way to resolve any issues, when things are due, you know what you’re going to get paid and when, like those are good things to have and so I want people to think of contracts as your friends.
The broad message is don’t fear the trademark, don’t fear the contract, don’t fear the copyright, don’t fear all those things. Yeah, it is something that we deal with every day and not think of and in both the town you live in and the town I live in, I’d say the analogy is air pollution. I mean, we deal with it every day but we don’t really think about it or most people don’t want to think about it, even though I’ve met a few people that think about it quite a bit, but most people just don’t want to and, of course, maybe bad analogy because the contract is your friend and air pollution is never your friend in a way, it doesn’t protect you from anything. It’s not like —
Maybe sunscreen, I don’t know.
Something like that. Well, Erin, thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes. I wish you the best. I love your mission of helping people get to the lifestyle they really want from what they’re really creating, understanding the real value of what’s going on inside your brain, and I don’t have video with this podcast but I keep pointing to my brain on this because that’s the true origin point, that that has value, understanding the value that that has and understanding that that’s like what makes you worth something and that is something that could create value beyond your generation.
Absolutely, absolutely. I love that. Thank you for having me. It’s been a joy.
Definitely. I would like to thank everybody out there listening as well. Just by listening to podcasts like this and trying to take some of these ideas, these factors into consideration such as when to think about your intellectual property, you’re taking the steps you need to get to the right mindset, to get to the right lifestyle, to get to the place where you really want to be in life so I want to give you all a little bit of congratulations for that and encourage you to tune into more episodes of my podcast. Check out Erin’s podcasts, Hourly to Exit, is that correct?
That’s correct, thank you.
And, yeah, have a great day and keep pushing and recognize that your dreams are valid and your ideas, your creations, things you put together have value.
Thank you.
Thank you.
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About Erin Austin
A graduate of Harvard Law School, Erin Austin is a strategic lawyer and consultant who uses her 25+ years of practicing law, including roles as COO and general counsel at large and small IP-driven companies, including Warner Brothers, Lionsgate (formerly known as Artisan), MGM, Teaching Strategies, and M3 USA Corp, to help founders of expertise-based firms build and protect saleable assets so that the business is ready to sell when the founder is ready to exit.
Through her Hourly to Exit podcast and her consulting practice, Think Beyond IP, Erin guides businesses on the journey of transforming their unscalable income-generator into a saleable wealth building asset. Her special talent is helping businesses meet their growth goals through the creation of IP-based revenue streams. Erin is passionate about using her expertise to create an economy that works for everyone. In her spare time, Erin likes to clear brush on her farmette, search for the perfect gluten-free baguette (all leads are appreciated!) and work on her backhand.