Westminster Council bought the copyright in the design of its iconic street signs (pictured). This means that it can now generate income fom licensing this intellectual property to businesses. The designs were created by Misha Black in 1967 and the copyright remained with the designer until his death, when it passed to his estate. Black’s …
Category: Intellectual Property
Beware ‘Copyright Grabs’
Photographer Chiz Dakin (Peak Images) asked me to warn other photographers about the problem of ‘copyright grabs’. Chiz is concerned about the trend for businesses, particularly large corporations, to “grab copyright in any image they can get their hands on”, as she puts it. This practice is a hazard for photographers who don’t carefully read …
Freemium: Give it away free!
Creative entrepreneurs often ask me how they can make money from their music or computer games when MP3 files and software is so easy to copy. One answer is to use the fact that people copy your stuff to change a threat into an opportunity. Banda Calypso’s music is copied onto CDs and sold on …
Madonna – creative businesswoman
Madonna has recently terminated her contract with Warner Music after 25 years and signed a new contract with tour company Live Nation. Now that digital music is so cheap, not to mention illegal downloads, Madonna recognises that her main income in future will be from performances and related products, not music sales. So she has …
Whose photos are on your website?
A friend of a friend of mine has just received an invoice for £7,000 from Getty Images for the unlicensed use of one of their photographs on his website. Ouch! For a while now, the bigger picture agencies such as Getty, Jupiter Media and Corbis have been marking their copyright material with code numbers which …
Innovating for the ‘Base of the Pyramid’
TÉLO is the first public telephone especially designed for public transport vehicles. Using a card for payment, millions of people using public transport are already using the phone on buses, trains and underground transport networks. Founded in August 2004, by Paulo Lerner and André Averbug, Brazilian company PV Inova (Public Vehicular Innovations) invented the system …
Ideas don’t make you rich
“Ideas don’t make you rich. The correct execution of ideas does.” So says Felix Dennis, poet, owner of Dennis Publishing, and one of the wealthiest self-made entrepreneurs in Britain. I met him several years ago when he gave generously to support a project I helped with at the National Library for the Blind, though he …
Let’s license works like George Lucas
We can devise business models in the creative industries by learning how to license works of creativity profitably, following the example of George Lucas – and a self-employed commercial illustrator in a small city in Brazil. In this way a business can be devised to transform the owner from a creative labourer to a true …
Creative Labourer – or Creative Entrepreneur?
Are you a true entrepreneur – or just a creative labourer? This was the question posed in my article about the E-Myth. Here’s a true story. Robert Altman was paid a cool $70,000 (US dollars) for directing the 1970 hit movie M*A*S*H. They needed a song for the movie so Robert Altman’s 14 year old …
The ‘E-Myth’ – the myth of the Entrepreneur
The Entrepreneurial Myth and working ‘on’ not ‘in’ a business. Michael E Gerber, in his book on the E-Myth (E-Myth Revisited), points out that there is a fundamental difference between knowing a technical skill or trade (eg as a designer, mechanic, chef) and running a business based on that skill (a design agency, a workshop …