The Wealth Spa

Ep #45 Protecting Your Most Precious Assets

Posted on 19. Jun, 2008 by Elizabeth Potts Weinstein in Management, Radio Show

Elizabeth invites Blue Melnick, Co-Founder and Lead Storage Specialist of Virtual Tape Drive Canada and Crash Ready Backup to share his tips about file backups. Blue takes the boring, non-sexy topic of file storage protection to a realm of realization explaining why most people don’t do it; sharing common mistakes made when developing a backup strategy and the pluses and minuses of software versus document backup. 

Elizabeth answers a listener question about the difference between trademark and copyright; and which you may need, when and for what. She also shares her Entrepreneur’s Success Tip of the Week: Taking Time! 

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 Blue has a special offer for listeners of The Wealth Spa Radio Show check it out – Be Crash Ready

Transcript:  Elizabeth Potts Weinstein welcomes small business owners, entrepreneurs and anyone who dreams of opening a business someday to this empowering hour of the Wealth Spa Radio Show where you’ll find answers to your most pressing financial and legal questions.  Now here is your host, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth:      Welcome everyone.  This is Elizabeth Potts Weinstein your host for the Wealth Spa Radio Show.  I want to welcome you to today’s show.  There are a couple of different things going like usual.  First, I have a guest for you.  He’s name is Blue Melnick and we’re going to be talking about one of the ways you need to protect your assets and this is really both personal and business aspects which is about backing up your computers, your computer or computers.  You know, most of us now have gazillion computers in our house nowadays.  And so yeah it sounds like a boring subject maybe but the idea is that this is one of our most important resources as business owners especially if you’re doing most of your stuff with your computers so want to figure out how can we protect this and make it as easy and not as expensive and time consuming as it might be.  You might think that it might be.

Second, and it’s the talk of the hour, I’ll be answering a question from one of you all which is about do I need to trademark or copyright my materials and the names of your programs.  So we’ll talk a little bit about trademarks, copyrights, what you can do that’s cheap and easy and when do you need to actually spend money.  And as we close the top of the hour, I’ll be sharing with you my entrepreneur success tip for the week which this is week is about taking time. 

So before we get in to everything, I just want to remind you, if you’re going to miss any part of the show or you want to make sure that you’re going to get future shows without having to remember what time to call in and listen to this just go to the website and listen to it.  You can always go to the wealthsparadioshow.com.  To get this show deliver to you automatically by email, by RSS feed or via iTunes.  So, again that’s the wealthsparadioshow.com and we’re also starting to load transcripts up there of shows.  So if you like to read shows as oppose to just listen to them, we just started doing that there’s one transcript up there and more transcripts are going to be up there soon. 

All right so let’s get into the show.  I want to introduce our guest.  Blue Malnick is the co-founder and lead storage specialist of Virtual Tape Drive Canada and Crash Ready Backup.  He ran a successful telemarketing company for more than six years, left that company to pursue a career in an industry that is his passion, which is technology.  He suffered a digital information loss himself and so now he has co-founded this Virtual Tape Drive Canada and Crash Ready Backup with his wife Erin.  So, since then he has been featured in multiple articles including Canada’s largest newspaper, had a bunch of articles published and is co-author of the upcoming book conscious entrepreneurs. 

So welcome today Blue.

Blue:               Thanks a lot for having me.  It’s a pleasure to be on the show.

Elizabeth:      Great.  So now talking in the beginning about how backing up our computers is type of an important part of asset protection, you know, last time people think about protecting assets is about incorporating or getting insurance.  But a lot of it is about things that we need to do ourselves, you know, cause you may get insurance, you know, if your house burns down, your office burns down, your computers melted or whatever happens.  Yeah, the insurance company may give you money to buy a new computer but all your files are gone so, you know, there’s some things that we need to do ourselves such backing things up.  You know, all these entrepreneurs and all of us, humans, who are living now in the planet who have computers probably know we’re supposed to do this stuff, suppose to back things up our files but a lot of us don’t so why are we not doing this?

Blue:               You know what Elizabeth, you said it right off the top and that it’s a boring topic.  You know, as entrepreneurs, we would rather go out and you know buy the next best marketing idea or spend more money on a trade show booth or something on those lines.  You know, we think of all these different ways that we can improve our business and we don’t always think about how to protect our business if we were to lose something.  You said it a couple minutes ago, we get insurance if our house burns down or we have items stolen from our business.  But you’re just going to get a check to replace your computer.

Elizabeth:      Right

Blue:               As you said, you’re not actually going to get your data back so I think probably somebody that both you and I know.  I was talking to her in Nashville, Alexandria Brown, we were talking about this exact topic and she said you know what?  It’s just not sexy. 

Elizabeth:      Yeah.

Blue:               And you know what?  That’s the truth of it but it’s incredibly important.  I, I’ll tell you a quick story.  Just literally a couple of days ago, I lived up in Toronto and we’re getting all the storms bad, the Midwest got over the past few weeks and we had a huge thunder and lightning storm.  And I got woken up in the middle of the night to a massive thunder crash.  And also there was lightning, I walk up into my office and my computer is dead.  And you know I’ve got a search protector on my computer, everything’s there, you know, but it’s gone. 

The hard drive is, excuse me, messed up and there are ways you can do it.  You can spend thousands of dollars to get it all back but fortunately for me, I just went out and bought a new computer and connected it to my own service, downloaded the information and was back up and running the next day.  But I’ll tell I hadn’t even thought about backing up probably for about three or four months.  And that wouldn’t have been any different had I not been using my own service.

Elizabeth:      So what’s the big mistake for business owners who’s trying to do this?  Cause I know a lot of people they will have some sort of back up system that they’re using but what are the common mistakes people make when they are actually trying to implement this?

Blue:               There’s a couple.  First of off, regularity, it has to be done on a regular basis because, I don’t know about you, but I know I spend probably four, five hours in front of my computer everyday.  And I value my time quite highly as I’m sure a lot of your listeners do.  So you know, four, five hours a day.  If you only do back up once a week that’s a lot of money that goes down the drain.  So people, some people to back ups only once a week to external hard drives, something along those lines.  You know, that’s a great start that’s a heck of a lot better than you know the 60, 70 % of people that don’t do back ups at all.

But yeah, it needs to be done on a regular basis.  It’s needs to be done everyday.  That’s one thing.  The other thing that people miss is trying to set up the back of themselves.  Because sometimes you would think that if you’re running on a windows computer or if you’re running on a Mac there’s these folders called my documents or documents on the Mac.

Elizabeth:      Right.

Blue:               And you would think that most of your information is in those folders cause you know, it says my documents

Elizabeth:      Those are my documents…

Blue:               Exactly.  Exactly.  But there are some, you know, pretty significant programs out there such as Quick Books, for one, which is used primarily as an Accounting program for so many small businesses.  That’s not where the default

Elizabeth:      That is not where it sticks the file.

Blue:               No, not at all.  So I mean, you’re backing up you’re my documents regularly, even if your doing it everyday, you’re not getting your accounting and that’s probably more important than everything that’s in your…

Elizabeth:      Right.  We’ll that’s the one.  God, I don’t even know how many hours that is to do that.  So another, is that I have another question was, you know, I can see and that is definitely an issue and it’s not just your my documents folder.  I also do this, I have a Mac, but it’s actually the same on Windows.  I tend to have a whole lot of files that aren’t in my documents folder yet there just sitting in my desktop and so when I first had my back up set-up, I was not backing that up.  I was like those were the ones I’m actually working on.  I really want those.

Blue:               Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

Elizabeth:      And of course we have this files that we don’t know about in other places.  What about the software?  So you know, I can see, you know, I know people who do both things.  I know a lot of people are just backing up files, you know, maybe your doc files, your accounting files, your photos all that stuff.  But then there’s some people who will back up their entire hard drive, you know, hate drive or something I guess that they do.  And so what are the pluses and minuses to both?  Cause you know it can take a lot time to reload all the software but I do at least theoretically have the CD somewhere.  You know, what do you recommend for most people to do? 

Blue:               You know what?  For most people backing up their entire hard drive is not just going to happen.  You know, it is a really really good idea to go out and pick up an external hard drive and when you first get your computer and you have it set-up the way you want.  You know we spend a week or so fiddling how our documents look and how our programs are and what programs we have installed and so on and so forth.  I recommend doing a full ghost of your system or a full clone of your system.  There are programs out there that do this for you.  On the pc side of things, there is Norton Ghost, which is a good application, and on the Mac side there’s a program called Super Duper which is fantastic.  And both of those will allow you to do a full clone that oftentimes is bootable. 

Anyway, we won’t get to technical.  It’s a good idea to do something like that, I would say, once a month.  You know, because we’re always downloading new little programs.  You find something that’s neat and you start using it regularly and so on and so forth.  So that’ what I would do there and then employ a service like ours, that automatically backs up your documents on a daily basis and usually and all of these different programs whether your doing it locally or remotely, the way they work is they don’t back up everything, everyday.  They only back up what has changed everyday.

Elizabeth:      The incremental changes so it won’t take forever.  Cause I know the first time I backed up like I got a new computer and the first time I backed up it was taking forever and I was like “dude, this can’t be.”  Cause it was like all night cause I was doing it remotely, you know, and I was like “this can’t happen.” When I get up six in the morning and it was still backing up but that was just the first time.  Then from then on, it was backing up the changes, which was really on a daily basis you’re not changing that much most likely. 

Blue:               Exactly.  You know what also, I mean, if we’re talking about remote storage, you know, bandwidth, internet speeds, are a bit of an issue.  You know, some people, a lot of internet marketers do a lot of work with audio files, video files and a lot of images and those are pretty big files and that stuff does take time so it depends on how much information your backing up.  The first time it might take all night.  I’ve had a couple of clients where there backing up 60, 70 gigabytes and at first back up actually takes a couple weeks.  So once that gets going then very short period of time every night. 

Elizabeth:      Right.  So we’ve just have got comments for the first break but I just want to address the whole idea of who needs to do off site back up?  So let’s talk about what that means and then what about just backing up to an external hard drive or a CD-ROM or a D…actually I don’t know if you could fit anything on a CD-ROM, a DVD or something like that versus, you know, if you actually need to do off site.

Blue:               Well I’ll tell you.  Conventional wisdom, most people you’ve talk or most people I talked think that the off site storage or the off site back up is really meant for those big companies that have big multinational, multiple locations…

Elizabeth:      Or banks.

Blue:               Yeah exactly.  Truth is, off site storage is even more important and more critical for people who work from home.  Because you know if you work from an office or you have a small business or you’re big business you can do a back up to an external drive or tape drive and take that drive home.

Elizabeth:      Okay.

Blue:               Well if you work from home and because you want to have your back up in a different location than your main computer.  Just you know, it makes sense.

Elizabeth:      Right, yeah, the place has burned down or gets stolen or whatever then…

Blue:               Exactly. Exactly.  Or if you get hit by lightning like I did.  My computer was not the only thing that died all of my electronics that were plug in, all had to be reset and I had a couple of external hard drives that melted as well.  Anyways, ??? after my house.  So people who work from home really are susceptible to these disasters, right?  Because you take your external hard drive home or out of the office, you’re just really from one room to another.  And people who work from home should really be using off site storage.

Elizabeth:      We’re about… I’m going to interrupt you right now.  We’re about ready to go to our first break.  And then everybody who’s listening after the break we’re going to talk a little bit more about what off site storage is, how it’s actually not as expensive as you might think and how you can get that set-up.  So stay tuned for that after the break.

BREAK

Elizabeth:      Welcome back everyone. This is Elizabeth Potts Weinstein your host for the Wealth Spa Radio Show and I have our backing up your computer expert, Blue Melnick, on with us.  Right before the break we were talking about backing up your computer hard drive like at home you know on actually an external hard-drive versus backing up off site.  And you know before we get into any more of this.  I want you to explain what is off-site back up mean?  Or how does that actually work?  Cause it’s not like back 10, 20 years ago and put everything on a tape drive and someone would drive it to a secure facility.  That’s not what we’re talking about anymore.

Blue:               I mean, I guess technically that is off-site but what we’re talking about when we are talking about off site remote storage nowadays is transmitting your data in a secure fashion over the internet to a company that stores it on secure servers.  So usually companies who provide this like ours they install an application on your computer for you, help you set it up and then once a day that application which kind of runs of from the background, fires up and scans your computer sees what files have changed and transmit those files securely over the internet.  So, you know, so there’s no walking back and forth to a storage locker or anything like that at all.  It all happens automatically all over the internet and everything gets stored.  Preferably at multi, what’s called co-located servers, so a company that would have server banks at two separate physical locations.  So because of course then, they have redundancy or they have back-up of your back-up.

Elizabeth:      Right, that’s one thing for me and at first at an off site back-up, I didn’t think about the fact that the off site back-up was located right by me.  I was like wait a minute if I am here in Silicon Valley and my off site back up is in Silicon Valley and the big earthquake happens.  Well that’s not very helpful, you know.  So it’s something to think about cause we’re lucky to do this.  you want to have at least one set of the server is somewhere far away where when there’s a natural disaster or a calamity that happens you know there’s a set of your data that’s somewhere completely out.

Blue:               Yeah, exactly or at least insure that the data facility is really really secure.  I know there are few data facilities in California that are they’re, I can’t remember what they’re called, but I mean basically, huge earthquakes could hit and these data centers would still be fine.

Elizabeth:      Right.

Blue:               Also, you know, a lot of the times all of these, most companies that do these if they’re set-up properly will have power of redundancy as well so if there’s a power outage of the local power system they’ll have 8 or 9 hours of battery back-up in addition to a diesel generator that powers the entire system so you never really notice anything going down.

Elizabeth:      So if you’re backing-up to an off site company, what happens if something happens to that company? 

Blue:               You know what, that’s a great question.  The first thing that I tell people obviously if the company goes bankrupt, chances are you’re not going to get your data back from them but hopefully you’ll still have your own copy of the data, right.  Hopefully what won’t happen is the company that you’re performing the back-up with goes bankrupt on the same day your computer crashes that will not be helpful at all.

Elizabeth:      Right.

Blue:               The other thing you want to make sure is that the company your storing your data with doesn’t actually have access to your data.  In other words, they store the files encrypted and using encryption mechanism where really only you have the key to that mechanism.  So even though they store all your personal data, all your financial data, all of that stuff.  They actually can’t read any of that.  So that’s very important as well especially when you’re talking about companies that if you’re dealing with smaller company you want to make sure that’s how they’re set-up because if they do go bankrupt…

Elizabeth:      They’ll sell their servers to get their only assets or whatever.

Blue:               Yeah, Exactly.  After they sell all their 5000 hard drives because, you know, they can make a few bucks off of that to pay off the bankruptcy lawyers.  But if you’re set-up with a reputable company and they’re storing your files in a secure fashion then you don’t have anything to worry about.

Elizabeth:      So let’s say someone has done this, maybe they have an external hard drive or that they even use an off-site kind of back-up system. And let’s say their computer is fried, the hard drive is fried, the computer melted or whatever happens, what do you do then?  What is the proceed cause you have a clone if you a ghost of your hard drive, it’s one thing versus just the files but what should you do if you wake up that day and your computer doesn’t work?

Blue:               First thing, it depends on how quickly you need a new computer for me cause I just went through this a couple days ago, my computer is an older computer that I was using.  I didn’t really want to spend the money to fix it.  I just went up to the store and bought a new one, brought it home, installed the few applications that I used for my business.  You know, Microsoft Office, QuickBooks made sure that my mail application was up and running and then installed the software to recover the data from the back-up center and type in my username and password and my unique key and selected the files that I wanted to recover from the server, pressed the button.  And I was recovering about 4.6 gigabytes, took a few hours but you know by the end of the day, I had my system exactly the way it was the night before because I bought a new computer.  It was shinier and it was faster.

Elizabeth:      Yeah.  And you were like Oooh this is actually kind of nice in a certain way.

Blue:               Yeah Exactly.  I’m kind of… it was perfect timing, I needed a new computer anyway.

Elizabeth:      So what about the person who hasn’t back up or maybe hasn’t backed-up recently?  And they open up their laptop and their hard drive is fried or at least it won’t turn on or whatever.  What do you recommend to these people?  What should they do?  Their way to get the stuff off the hard drive.

Blue:               You know what?  There is a way.  Most failures, most computer failures aren’t actually a completely fried hard drive.  Usually it’s a software issue where the part of the hard drive that tells windows where all the files are located is corrupted and then windows can’t launch.  So there’s nothing actually technically wrong…

Elizabeth:      They just can’t find anything.

Blue:               Exactly.  There are programs out there that will get around that.  I’m trying to think off the top of my head there’s one called, I mean Get Your Data Back by a website, the website is runtime.org and they provide data recovery software for PCs, just PCs if I remember correctly, actually.  And then there is also a similar application on the Mac side of things.  But you still need a working computer to pull your hard drive out of the old one and connect it to the new one with Windows running then you can scan it and get your information back.

Now that probably sounds like a long, arduous process.  Most of your local, you know, local tech person usually want that gives more oriented towards businesses.  You’ll be able to help with that.  Don’t go to Best Buy to…

Elizabeth:      Of course, they know how to hook up wireless internet in someone’s house but…

Blue:               Exactly, but they’re not going to be able to help you.  They’re going to format your hard drive and re-install Windows for you but you still don’t have your information. You know, local computer guy should have access to it.  It would probably take a few hours, a good computer person is going to charge anywhere from 75 to 150 dollars an hours.  Expect to pay a few hundred dollars to get your information back.  But if there is actually something physically wrong with your hard drive it can cost as little as a 1000 dollars to you know as much as 10000, 15000 dollars depending on how much, how badly you need that information. 

So you know, backing up your data on a regular basis is critical because that doesn’t even count the amount of time that it takes you to get that back. 

Elizabeth:      And how long you don’t have the stuff in the middle of that.

Blue:               Exactly.

Elizabeth:      So we’re getting close to the next break.  I have one more question for you.  What about all of our websites and blogs and all that stuff?  How do we back up that?

Blue:               It’s really…

Elizabeth:      Is that a whole new other call?

Blue:               To be honest, it is a whole new other call.  I’ll answer it really quickly.  Most blogging software such as Word Press, Blogger some of the other applications like that, TypePad.  They have a mechanism built in where you can export where you can export the data from the Sequel or from the MySQL Database and back that up.  But most services that you’ll store your blog on will have redundancy built in.  So I’ll say of course it’s important but if you’re data is stored in a big company, chances are they’re already backing it up on their end.

Elizabeth:      I think with mine like I do that where I have a little file that gets sent to me everyday which is the back-up of my blog.  And I stick with my host, I have a thing set-up ever so often it sends a back-up, just you know, in case something happens.  I have reputable host.  So the worse is they’re going to explode every single server in the whole system on one day.

Blue:               Right Exactly.

Elizabeth:      But I think it’s a good idea.  Especially for like text files blog cause it’s really easy to back-up with things like Word Press usually click the box and tell it…

Blue:               Oh yeah.  Absolutely.  And then you just take that file and include it with…

Elizabeth:      Everything else…

Blue:               Drop it in the directory that is being automatically backed-up already whether it’s your time machine on the Mac like we were talking about on one of the breaks or through a remote, you know, automatic off-site storage.

Elizabeth:      Okay. So we’ve got another minute or so before the next break.  I just want to give you a chance to share with everyone how they can find out more information about you and your company.

Blue:               Yeah. Absolutely.  Thank you very much.  The company is Crash Ready Backup as you mentioned in the intro.  And we set-up a little page for you guys its becrashready.com and there’s a bunch of information on there.  If anybody wants to contact me directly, they’re welcome to.  My e-mail address is blue@crashready.com and blue is just B-L-U-E.  And yeah, I mean, if we’re not the right service for you we’ll point you in the right direction.

Elizabeth:      Okay. That’s great.

Blue:               So you know it’s not just… don’t just call and expect to be sold.  We’ll help you design the right service for you.

Elizabeth:      The Right Solution.

Blue:               Yeah.

Elizabeth:      Yeah.  Again that’s becrashready.com. Is that right?

Blue:               Yeah, you got it.  B-E crash C-R-A-S-H ready R-E-A-D-Y.com.

Elizabeth:      Okay great.  Thank you.  So now we’re going to go to our next break everyone.  After the break, I’ll be answering a question from one of you all and then we’ll get to the top of the hour we’re talking about the entrepreneur success tip for the week.  So stay in tuned for that after the break.

BREAK

Elizabeth:      Welcome back everyone.  This is Elizabeth Potts Weinstein, your host for the Wealth Spa Radio Show.  In the last half an hour we had…excuse me, we had Blue Melnick on we were talking about backing up your computer and what you need to do, what you need to know.  And if you would like any more information from or learn about his business and how they supervise these kinds of solutions you can go to the website becrashready.com.  That’s be, B-E, crashready.com.  I’m going to go check them up too.  Cause I actually right this second don’t have off-site back up.  I used to a month ago and then I stopped doing it and I need a new solution so I’m going to go check them up myself. 

If you miss any part of that part of the show, segment of the show, you can always go to the wealthsparadioshow.com and sign up to get this show delivered to you automatically by e-mail or RSS feeds or iTunes or in a week or so you get to read the transcript. 

Okay let’s get to the next part of the show.  Now is when I answer a question from one of you all and just FYI if you want to ask a question to be answered on the show of course you can always call in to the show.  But if we’re not going to be here in the exact right time or are shy or something like that you can go to the wealthsparadioshow.com and ask your question there either by e-mail or by calling in to a phone number.

Okay, you can also go to the Face Book Group and post your question there.

Alright, let’s get into the question for the day.  This question is about trademarks and copyrights.  So the question is do I need to trademark or copyright my materials and my program name?  If so, how?

So, regardless of exactly what kind of business you’re in.  You’re creating stuff all the time.  You’re creating written works, you have a website, you’ve articles you’ve written, made have written a book or have an e-book or something like that you sell.  But even if you’re providing services for the clients and you’re selling products to someone else.  You have marketing copy that you have written.  You have the stuff that you have written that you give to your client.  So how do you protect that? 

The whole idea of trademarks, copyrights, patents, trade secrets, all these different kinds of ways that you can protect this information is that you’ve invented or created this stuff and assets you want to be able to protect it.  As small business owners a lot of times, one of the biggest assets of our business, beside the computer that we’ve talked about it in the last segment, one of our biggest asset all this intellectual properties.  All these things that, you know, it’s not a piece of land; it’s not something physical that has value for us.  It’s stuff that doesn’t necessarily exist in some physical way.  So how do we protect that?

So I want to get into trademarks and copyrights to give you a little short primer about the difference between a trademark and a copyright cause a lot of people get those kind of messed up.  When do you use one of the other?  Which one is applicable to you? 

What a trademark is?  A Trademark is a word, a set of words, a picture or a symbol, it can even be a smell or a sound that lets consumers know or lets the public know the source of the product or service that identify where a particular product or service comes from in the eyes of the customers or the public.  So for instance the little schwa sign that’s the Nike, that little curly thing for Nike.  If you don’t know how to say the word Nike, if you just see that little curly thing you know you’re talking about Nike.  So in the exact same way, the word Nike itself is also a trademark for the Nike brand of shoes.  If you see a shoe with the word Nike in it, you know it comes from Nike. 

Then there’s Pepsi, if you see a soda and has that color, has the symbols on it, the word Pepsi, you know it’s a cola that comes, that’s sold by Pepsi Co.

So in your business, you have words, symbols, maybe you have smells, you may have all kinds of unique things that identify the uniqueness of your products and service to your customers, clients, to the public.  A lot of times it’s things like the name of your business, the name of your service, the name of your system that you sell, the name of your website, may or may not be a domain name, that’s a whole another question, issue, it can also be a tagline, it could be the symbol or the way you have your banner on the top of your website there’s a lot of different that could identify your business to your clients and customers.

Now copyright is a little bit different.  A copyright or things that can’t be copyrighted are creative work that has been fixed in a tangible medium, tangible format.  It’s something unique that you have created and it could be an article that you wrote, it could be a sculpture that you created, it could be the recording of a speech or the recording of the music that you’ve performed.  All those things are creative works that have been made into a tangible format.  I say it like that because there’s not Federal Protection that hasn’t been put in a tangible format, into something that you can hold in your hand. 

So for example, if you did give a speech, it doesn’t necessarily have US Federal Copyright Protection, the recording of the speech or the transcript of the speech does. A lot of times we record our transcribed stuffs so we still get copyright protection, and there might be state law protection there so that’s a whole another topic.  I’m not going to confuse you.

All right.  So that’s the basics of trademark and copyright.  So typically for let’s say you’ve created something that you’re selling.  Let’s talk about an e-book.  You wrote this e-book and has the title and you have the book that you wrote.  And you also have the sales copy; you have some web page that has all the copy that you have written to sell this e-book.  So the name of the e-book that you might be want to be a trademark.  It might be unique and distinctive enough; you want to protect that so that no one can sell an e-book with the exact same name. 

There’s a whole lot of issues with regular books whether or not you can trademark the title of the book.  You can’t trademark the title by itself.  It has to be used in business.  That’s a whole another question too.

Well let’s talk about e-book cause we’re selling it over the internet.  We’re not worrying about regular books.  I don’t know all the rules applied there.  Let’s say it’s also not just an e-book.  It also has CDs with it that would make it more easy.  Okay so you have this system that you’re selling that’s got e-books, some CDs and has a title.  You may want to trademark that title and you already have common law here in the United States, common law trademark protection just by using those words in Commerce, in inter-state commerce, i.e. on the web or just using it in conjunction with your product or service.  Then the materials that make up the sales page or this product, the marketing materials as well as the e-book itself and this content of the CDs that you’re selling that all is protected by copyright law. 

Now here in the United States, you automatically have a protection as soon as you create the thing.  You have common law copyright protection but you can get to sue anybody for it.  You do protection but you can’t get anybody to get them to stop copying it.  So what can you do to give yourself more protection?  When you actually need to go hire a lawyer?  That’s really what I wanted to direct. 

Here, the first, for the things in your business that are copyrightable, the works that you’ve created, the writings, the auditory reporting, you want to at least use that little copyright symbol.  The C with the little circle around it and you can put the date and your name.  The idea of being, you want the world to know that “yeah I am going to enforce my copyright.  Don’t just copy this gosh darn thought, stuff off my website is not for the public domain, for anyone to use, I am going to assert my rights over this, these materials.

Now will that protect you against every nefarious person?  No, but it will keep the innocent copiers from most likely copying your stuff.  You at least want to use the copyright symbol, same thing with the trademark.  You have the tagline or the name or the little graphics that goes with this e-book-CD package.  You automatically have common law trademark protection here in the United States and how you would say that to the world is that you put a little TM.  You know, those little capital TMs that kind of goes in a superscript after the word or the symbol, use that.  That says the world “I am putting my foot down and I want to keep the trademark protection over this symbol or word or graphic.”

Now is that the best that you can do? No, but it’s free and it’s a great place to start.  So with those names and symbols, use the TM symbol with…the bottom in the footnotes or at the bottom of the website or at the bottom of the article for the works that you have created, use the copyright symbol. 

I also recommend if you have stuff that’s on the web, you want to make sure that people, you might want to start policing whether or not someone’s copying your stuff and putting it in other parts of the World Wide Web.  One easy way to do that is using Google Alert.  Google Alert is a free service provided by Google where you can set it up to one Google searches.  You know, all the time, once everyday or whatever terms you want.  If you use it to see if you’re getting pressed, you can use it for research purposes.  Another way to use it is to police your trademarks and copyrights.  You can put the name of your unique system, you can put the name of your business, you can put key phrases, out of your articles or out of your e-books or out of your sales page and Google Alert then Google will run searches for those words and come back with any new results that happen in the last day. 

For example, I use this to find someone had copy one of my articles off my website without my permission.  I might not have ever found them otherwise except that I got in a Google Alert and I actually contacted them and gave them permission to use the article if they link back to me. So it’s a win-win for everybody.  But it’s a very easy way to make sure someone is not copying your stuff out on the web and to police your own stuff.

All right.  We’re going to go to the next break, last break.  I’m going to finish up this question of trademark and copyright and then we’re going to go to the entrepreneur success tip for the week.  So again tune in for that after the break.

BREAK

Elizabeth:      Welcome back everyone.  This is Elizabeth Potts Weinstein, your host for the Wealth Spa Radio Show and before the break; I was talking about copyrights and trademarks.  As a business owner specially if you are creating content whether its stuff on your website, an e-book, a system, an event that you are doing, how do you protect that stuff? And we talk a little bit about differences between trademarks and copyrights and the things that you can do for free as simple as using the copyright symbol, the little TM and setting up Google Alert.

Now do you need to actually file trademarks and copyrights to yourself? Can you do these things yourself?  Do you need to hire an attorney?  When should you spend the money? The more, if something that you’re creating is very core to your business, is very easy to copy, is worth a lot of money to you then, of course, you want to spend more time and energy on it than the things that are not as important. You know, the little blog posts that you do, the articles that are on your website, you may not want to file formal protections on them especially individually versus a book that you write.  So what I recommend is that if something is very highly valuable to your business.  So, for instance, you’ve written this kit where it has an e-book, it has a handbook in it, it has CDs, it has all kinds of stuff in it then you may want to actually get formal copyright protection.  And copyright protection a lot of times you can do that yourself.  It depends on how complicated the medium is that you’ve used.  You’ve combined the…a lot of things.  If it’s relatively unique versus just a book.  You know something that the form is easy to find. 

Finally, copyright, you do it in copyright US office if you’re here in the United States.  I think its $45 for most things.  It’s relatively simple and easy, filling out of the form, sending them the copy of stuff.  But sometimes you need to hire someone to help you out with it if you have something that’s more complicated.  And you might be filling out the wrong form.  Don’t forget with filling the copyright, if you are going to do it.  You want to do it ASAP after you create that thing cause of a lot of rights and default rules that apply.  The faster you get it done.

Trademarks for most people I recommend not doing trademarks yourself.  I recommend hiring an attorney or some kind of service to do it for you.  The reason is that trademark is not just about filling out forms even though you can.  It’s physically possible to do it yourself at the United States Patent Trademark Office, which is uspto.gov, but as a person, as a human being in the Patent Trademark Office, who evaluates your application for trademark.  And so most of the, a lot of the time, they’re going to file an office, you’re going to file your trademark application and then you’re going to get a response back and you have to defend yourself.  You want to make sure it’s done right and make sure you’re defending yourself correctly especially if this is something really important to your business and it’s easier to hire an attorney and have an attorney handle it at the beginning than bring them in the middle when maybe you’ve already messed something up. 

I do mine by myself but that’s because I am lawyer and for many of you it may make sense to hire someone.  Also filing a trademark application does cost a couple hundred bucks without hiring a lawyer so you want to make sure it’s done right.

Okay so let’s move on to the last part of the show, which is my entrepreneur success tip for the week.  And this week’s tip is about taking time.  And this is something that I’ve really been exploring in my own business.  I talk a lot on the show and a lot of other aspects in my business.  I’ll talk about how the universe loves speed and you don’t need to do stuff perfectly, just need it to get it launch.  I talk a lot about, you know, I’ll run into somebody at a conference and I’ll run into them a year later at the same conference and they’ll say to “Oh it’s Elizabeth, you’ve done all these stuff. It’s so amazing.” And I’ll say to them, “What have you accomplish since the last time we saw each other at this conference a year ago?”  And a lot of this people haven’t launched the website yet.  They haven’t changed or sorted out their businesses.  And the reasons are “I didn’t have a lot of time.  I want it to be perfect. We’re still working on it.”  And you know how it doesn’t need to be perfect.  Just get the darn thing launched.  Get it out the door and you can start making money and you can always fix it later. 

You know one thing that I’ve been running into my business.  I’m getting to the point where I want to start fixing it.  I’ve launched just like gosh awful number of websites and blogs and products and sales pages and all kinds of stuff that was good as good enough.  I got it out there.  I was starting to sell it, build a new list, doing all these things.  Developing my reputation is great.  But then I’m getting to this point in my business where I realize “You know what? I’m not going to launch any new products, not going to launch any new blogs, no new websites, nothing big, no big gigantic new things in the next six months.

Next six months from my business is going to be about fixing all that stuff. So yes, I have the E-Zine and I got it launched.  My new E-Zine is about…probably seven months ago, eight months ago?  Yeah, something like that so November, yeah, it was eight months.  You know what?  I totally want to redo the format of it.  It was good enough, the contents there; I mean its not bad E-Zine by any means but it’s not perfect how I want it to be.  I’m not shooting for protection but there’s a definite, a whole lot bunch of changes I want to make and now I want to take time to make those changes.  I’m going to take time to make the changes to my websites and change how the layouts of all my websites and the graphics and the things. 

Take time to create systems, a bunch of things for my business where I’m still doing it and haven’t delegated it to any of my VA, my virtual assistants.  And why?  Cause I haven’t taken the time to sit down to write out the steps and delegate it.  This is also a great time to draw up stuff.  It’s a great time to take time in your business, 6 months, 3 months, even a month to look at all the stuff that you do and what can be dropped.  What’s inefficient?  What’s not a good use to your time?  Maybe you’re in a million networking group.  Are all these networking groups you’re in bringing in clients?  Probably not all of them.  Probably half or maybe even only 20 percent of them actually are the ones that are worth the most for you.  So drop the rest of them.

Look at your products or the services you provide.  Are there some of your products and services that bring in really small amount of money yet have a huge amount of customer service?  Look at your clients.  Do some of your clients require a huge amount of hand totalling and really don’t bring in very much money.  Or maybe they bring in a hefty sum of money but they drive you off the wall.  Okay. 

This is a great time, you know, once you get to a certain point in your business.  You’ve launched all kinds of stuff; you’re growing at a super fast rate.  It is important to take time to get those ducks in a row.  You know, even for me, I’m getting ready to send grow up strategy book off to the printers.  And as I’m pulling through the last proof reading of it realized that I’ve implemented most of the stuff I recommend in my book.  But not everything and part it off so I’m going to be doing in the next 6 months is implementing all of the stuff that I teach in my own gosh darn book. 

What I recommend for you, if you have been going a thousand miles an hour and implementing all kinds of stuff and doing, doing, doing in your business and growing, growing, growing in your business.  Give yourself permission to take time off from doing more, from launching new things, from more creation to consolidate your position.  Clean up the mess to get your systems in order, to hire the staff that you need, to drop stuff that’s not efficient.  You’re all ready for the next big push.  So for me, it’s all about beginning of 2009 I’m going to come out 1000 miles an hour. 

So work on all the stuff that needs to be in the next six months to get ready for that.  Okay that’s my tip for this week. 

Next week, on next week’s show I’m going to have Alexandra Brown.  I’m very excited to have her on the show.  She used to be called the E-Zine Queen.  Now she is the million-dollar business coach and we’re going to be talking about how to deal with growing fast.  You know, you may have a business.  A lot of business that grow super fast and it is very easy to have it get out of control and even go under.  So how do you deal with exponential growth and how it can be a wonderful thing and not a terrible thing. 

Don’t forget if you’re going to miss the show or want to listen to any past shows of the Wealth Spa Radio Show you can always go to the wealthsparadioshow.com.  You can listen to past shows, now you can start reading transcriptions of shows or get future shows delivered to you automatically by e-mail, RSS feed or even on iTunes.  And you can submit questions for me to answer on future show. 

Thank you so much for listening to today’s show and I look forward to speaking with you next week. Bye bye.

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Tags: Asset Protection, Intellectual Property