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 …
Category: Intellectual Property
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’
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 or a restaurant). Many would-be entrepreneurs who break away from …
Protecting – and profiting from – your Intellectual Property
How do you protect your creative works? And importantly – how do you generate income streams from your intellectual property? Creative people are rightly concerned about being ripped off, so we need to know more about how to protect our works by understanding and using intellectual property rights (IPR) such as copyright, trade marks, patents …