All ExpertPreneurs must struggle with the effort, time and money needed to properly police their intellectual property rights on the Web.
But a recent piece by Andrew Glass of Politico.com should give pause to consider a real World perspective on the problem.
While the article is not written with ExpertPreneurs specifically in mind, the lesson in the article is quite instructive for them.
Even as the boundaries of copyright protection, and the claims for them, increase, seemingly exponentially, every day, there is a simple concept that must be applied to intellectual property rights as much as to everything else in life.
Since most ExpertPreneurs have limited time and money, they must determine the commercial value of their individual pieces of intellectual property to determine how much of that time and money they wish to devote to the protection of any particular piece.
This is where having a sound intellectual property protection strategy comes into play. Such a strategy is an indispensable tool for every ExpertPreneur.
An intellectual property strategy begins with a plan for the type of intellectual property you intend on creating and in what formats it will be distributed, e.g. a book, audio, DVD, etc.
Then, the commercial value of the piece, now or in the future, must be assessed, so that the greatest amount of available resources can be devoted to those works that are considered to be the most valuable.
It is important to keep in mind, however, that intellectual property protection is not an all or nothing game. Choosing to prioritize the the amount of resources used to protect certain works is not carte blanche to ignore the rest.
Instead, it should be used as a method to refine your intellectual property protection strategy to give some protection to some of your works, while giving more to the most important.
Fortunately, today's intellectual property legal systems afford a great deal of flexibility in how to approach these matters and all ExpertPreneurs would be wise to take this into account in formulating their intellectual property strategy.
Without this type of strategy, no ExpertPreneur can hope to have a systematic method of protecting their valuable works and risks having insufficient legal protections in place to go after infringement when it matters most.
Comments