Start-Up Cautionary Tales – Copyright

It is a truth universally acknowledged that start-ups will forget about intellectual property. It's an understandable oversight: IP often flies under the radar as forgettable housekeeping and before you know it the once small, easy-to-fix jobs have erupted into angry, expensive messes. Today we're talking about copyright.

For the uninitiated, copyright is an automatic right that protects the creative work done to physically express an idea. You draw a picture, design a logo, make a website: you automatically own the copyright in that picture or logo or website. You don't need to register anything or pay a fee, you just own it and will continue to own it until the 70^th anniversary of your death. Brilliant.