Legal Q & A for Creative Entrepreneurs - Brittany Ratelle - Live IG replay

That would be more helpful, huh? I'm not your attorney unless you want me to be. So, I can't see your face, thank you. Yeah, I didn't flip the camera around on my phone. So, it's a lot to manage both the computer and the phone. This is new that I'm trying to do both on Instagram and Facebook at the same time. So, anyway. But I did get one question before, which I'll go ahead and jump in, and then if anyone else has a question, go ahead and you can put it in the comments as well. So the question I got before from the Kitschy Stitcher is, is there any way to copyright your artistic designs? And it's funny, this person asked that because I'm actually working on a client's copyright right now. I actually was in my zone working on that and I wasn't noticing the time, so that's why I'm a little late jumping on, because you know, you get going on a project and I don't know if you're like this, but I just kind of get in my zone and I sometimes have a hard time paying attention to the time. So, the answer is yes. So, when we talk about IP law, intellectual property law, there's really two main vehicles that we have for protecting your content. One is copyright and one is trademark. And copyrights are, just as an FYI, as soon as you create something in a fixed medium, meaning as soon as it comes out of your brain and it gets written down somewhere or put on a computer or drawn out, or you're a jewelry maker and you create the little jewelry, the bracelet or something, as soon as it's created in something, some actual thing, it is actually copyrighted. You can put the little C with the symbol right there and your name and the date and you can proclaim, you know, Michael Scott style, "I have copyrighted my thing." You can do that. You totally have that right. However, you get some extra benefits when you register that copyright. And that's what I think when a lot of people think of copyright, or that's copyright, you can't use that, or, you know, that's infringing on my copyright. That's what they think of. And to register your copyright, you do that with the US Copyright Office. And that is actually— it's a pretty simple process. You just use their online little form, and you have to submit your name and the name of what you're registering, when it was created, if it's a any derivative work of something else that might have an existing copyright. So, you know, if you took something and then added on to it, um, you want to disclaim obviously the part that's not yours because you're not going to be able to copyright that. So, um, and, um, and so, um, you can do that. And it needs to be an original, uh, artistic work of some kind. Um, the things that you cannot copyright, which a lot of people do, are short words and phrases. So You know, if you want to copyright "On Wednesdays we wear pink," and that's one that I get a lot because people have that on their Clevver t-shirts, that's going to be a short phrase, so you're probably not going to be able to protect that. That, just being able to say that line on a t-shirt. So you're also probably not going to be able to protect it because it's part of what's likely a copyright-protected work, which is the movie Mean Girls, and that's what that's from. So I don't know if they've registered that entire script. Or, you know, I haven't looked specifically into that work on what copyright protection or intellectual property protection, but they might be something. Certainly, you're not going to be able to put that on a t-shirt with like a photo from the movie, like a screenshot, because that probably can be considered licensed material and infringement. So if you have a short word or phrase, like it's a slogan for your business, and that's where people are like, what about "Just Do It"? I know that's protected.. And that is— but that is protected by trademark law. And trademark law is the protection of intellectual property that's actually supposed to be for the consumer. And the idea here is that we want to make sure that as a consumer, when you buy something, if you buy a can of Jif peanut butter, you have a right to know that Jif is the one who actually made it. So, we want to protect people's ability to source goods and to be clear about who made these goods and who's selling these goods.. And that's what brand names are for. They're supposed to distinguish goods and allow you as a consumer the right to be able to say, what exactly am I buying? Where did this come from? Who's selling this? If I have a problem, who do I need to contact? And that's why if you are Nike, you could trademark your logo, the swoosh. You could trademark your name, Nike, and you could trademark your slogan, "Just Do It," and kind of put that all together as a package. Now, if you're Nike, you have the means to trademark anything and everything. So if you come out with a new shoe you could probably trademark the name of that shoe. You see how you can go with this. So some people decide that they want to do copyright protection for a lot of their creative works, artistic works. So if you're a t-shirt designer, if you have a creative artwork that you designed, something like feathers like this that's kind of in a cool way, you could probably register that copyright. If it's just text on a t-shirt, that's probably going to be pretty tough. You're probably not going to be able to copyright protect that. If you're a business owner, the name of your company is something that you probably would like to trademark, and that you could do your name and your logo, and that's really popular for people. If you have a slogan or a tagline, you could actually trademark protect that too. So this is kind of the common package, and that's what I do for a lot of clients is I have kind of a $1,000 basic trademark package, and we do those things. We trademark their name and their logo to protect that. So that makes it so someone can't, you know, if you set up Brittany's Petal Shop, then someone can't come along and use that exact same name of Brittany's Petal Shop. The one thing you have to be careful about trademark is if it's too descriptive about what you are opening. Like if you are a pizza restaurant and you call it the Pizza Shop, you're probably not going to be able to protect that because that's super descriptive of what you're running. You are a shop that sells pizza. That's going to be hard for you to say, "You're the only one who can use those words together," or pizza shop, okay? So you want a good strong trademark. You want it to be a lot more creative, original. That's why you see companies using made-up names for their brand names. You know, Omniture, Xerox, Google. These are made-up words. So they're really strong trademarks because no one has thought of them before or used them because they're made-up words. So as you start thinking about your business, it's good to be thoughtful and thinking ahead and trademark. And as you name your business, if you want a way to check that quickly for trademarks, you want to access the TESS database, which is— that's the Trademark Electronic Search Database. Unless, of course, it's like now during a government shutdown and those databases are offline. Well, the copyright, I was able to do it, but they said they can't process it until shutdown ends because the government's completely incompetent and embarrassing. So anyway, so that's probably more information than you needed, but that's kind of the basics of copyright law and trademark law. So, um, because I get a lot of questions about that, about people wanting to protect their content. So, um, and I'll say the first line of defense if you're worried about people stealing your stuff is, um, make sure you put, you know, the copyright clearance info at the bottom of your website. Like I said, make sure you have some language in your site on your site, your terms of service or terms and conditions that talks about that your content, that you are reserving all your rights, what people can and can't do. If you have something that you're selling and you say you want to allow people to print it off for their personal use, then say that. But if you don't— are not allowing people to upload it to somewhere where they could be publicly available, then say that. If they can't use it for commercial use, then say that. The more information you can give about what exactly, what boundaries you're putting on your content, the greater chance that people have of obeying that. And then when there's a problem, the greater chance you have of actually getting some resolution because you can point to someone and say, hey, you agreed to these, you know, these terms when you bought my product. You know, when you signed up for my course, you, I said that you could have the slides. I did not say that you could scrape all the slides and put them on a new website and give them away for free or even worse, sell them for money that now you were going to pocket. So you want to, you know, protect a little bit yourself there. So if you have more questions about specifically what products you have and how you want to protect them, again, you can always email me, hello@brittanyratelle.com. That's kind of if you want to take the next step in becoming a client and want more specifics on details in terms of pricing and availability of what I might be able to do for you or set up a consultation. You could also do that on my website. So BrittanyRatelle.com, I have my calendar there. Where you could sign up for a free 20-minute consultation. We'll talk on the phone about your business, maybe what your needs are, where you want to go, and try to fill in the gaps and get you going on some legal plans to get you all set up. So, okay, um, there was a question up top, so I will rewind a little bit and get to that. Um, okay, she was just saying the video was choppy. Sorry about that. Hopefully it's better. It's— it might be because I'm overloading my Wi-Fi and trying to do both Facebook and Instagram. So I might have to play around with that a little bit. Okay, is there— are there any other questions anyone else wanted to share? I'm totally— I'm up for it. I'm here for you. I have a few more minutes before I need to go and get kiddos ready for preschool. I will also say that if you're interested in more information, again, I do these every Monday at this time. Time. I also have a newsletter that I send out every week with some free tips and tricks, um, so you can sign up for that on my website, and I give you a free legal business checklist with that. I also have a podcast that comes out on Friday called Law and Wit, um, that has a lot of information. So, okay, so, uh, Karina asks, so she works with clients and she takes a third of the profit, um, should we have a separate business checking account for Stripe? Yes, um, it's, you know, I know it's, it's a brave— it's, it's, you know, a brave new world because we have so many options now with processing electronic payment and how we do that. But I do recommend that you try to be really careful in keeping your business money separate from your personal money. And I think, I know it's all too easy because I've done it before, is you have like one PayPal account or Stripe and you invoice everyone on that and then, you know, suddenly you buy something online, you know, and you're online shopping and you're like, oh great, PayPal, I can put my PayPal right in and I know there's money in there because I just made some money on something else. The problem is, is that that starts to look like that's not a real business account, that that's a commingled account, and that could put your business designation of being an LLC at risk. Because as soon as you start commingling your assets in terms of your business expenses and your personal expenses and business assets and personal assets, it makes it look like you're not operating a real business. And that's a big deal because if you get sued, what you're gonna wanna say is No, no, no, you cannot have access to my protected little stuff over here, my 401k and my house and my personal checking account. You can only have access to what's in the business. So you want to make it very clear what's in the business and that there is a DMZ, that there's a separation. So set up a business, make sure you have a business banking account, checking account, and then say set up some sort of payment protocol, whatever you use most often in the name of that business. And you know, if it's— I know it's hard to remember. Maybe do it in the name of your business email and that way you can keep it really straight. No, wait, if you're going to sign in, do it a business email. So, okay. Um, should I make one within one within with, with each client or just be mine? Oh, just be yours only. So I could say you could just make it in the name of your client and then, um, I mean it depends on if you're processing payments for your client, then I guess you'll have to have that one for that client. Um, Ideally, they would just be the one getting paid from their business account, and then you would just be taking money from it. But that's part of your services, then you might have to set one up for each client, or you just set one up for a business one, and then you just pay money from that. So that might be a way you can do it. And it's almost— you're kind of treating it like a trust account where it's your business funds. And then, you know, make sure that you're just really clear with the accounting. Make sure you're using screenshots and spreadsheets. I don't know, Karina, if she's good at this, because I know she's on top of all those little details. That's very clear to the client what the payments are that are coming in and what their payout is that they're due. So, okay, okay. So Chelsea is asking, if I plan to have a few businesses like an influencer one and a clothing shop, can you register under one umbrella LLC, or should they do separate? Great question. So I recommend that— it kind of depends on the level of risk you know, what kind of a business is, if it's more of a risky business or not. For something where it's, you know, influencing, blogging, you know, content creation and a clothing shop, you could probably have them under one LLC just because I don't see either of those as really a risky business. However, if you were going to get into event planning or something that was more live in person, that carries a bit, a lot more risk to it. So I would probably recommend having a separate LLC for that. And clothing is pretty low risk. But if you were having a product like any kind of health and wellness product or any kind of food product or something like that, I would recommend a separate LLC just for that product. Again, because it comes back to if you got sued, if there was a problem, you'll all solve it now. If there was a problem, you want that person just to have access to whatever in that little LLC shell, and you don't want them to have access to all of your business assets. I would also probably take a look at what is the income level and profit level. If you have one that's super profitable, you maybe don't want to have everything lumped under that umbrella because now you're putting all those profits at risk. If you have one that are, you know, that's pretty same in terms of their level of risk, risk and reward and profit, then maybe it's okay to have them together. So, but I will tell you that it's pretty easy to set up LLCs. You know, I do it for clients. I do like a flat fee of $300 and you could do it yourself. Here in Utah, we have really reasonable registration fees and it's like $78 to set one up and then it's $15 a year to renew. So if you're all worried or if it makes you feel better or more legit to have separate, they just set up separate and, and you could even have one that's like your last name, Ratelle Holdings, and then you can have— that's the holding LLC and then you can have separate LLCs underneath it. And you see people who have, you know, more complex business structures, they'll do stuff like that. Some people even will set up a separate business just to control their intellectual property. Because if they think, I have a risk of getting sued, you know, if you're a musician or something where all, all of your eggs are in that intellectual property basket, then you want to keep that separate. So someone goes after it, they can't get to everything else. So anyway, those are some deep thoughts on LLC formation, but that's a great question. So, and let me know if you're interested in setting one up and I'll send you my intake form and we'll get you going with that. That. So, okay, um, I probably have time for like one more question if anyone else wants to hop on. Have some of my water. I've been trying to drink more water. It's hard. It's hard to drink water, you know, it's total first world problems. But awesome, thanks. You're welcome, Charles. Uh, you're welcome. No, um, okay, unless anyone else has a question, I, I'll post this to my account. So, um, if there's someone else who you think that could be could use this information, please pass it on. You know, I really try to put out a lot of free information to people, and I really try to make sure that it's valuable of your time, because I know you're busy just like me. But so if you know someone it'd be helpful to, I'd really appreciate sharing. Sharing is caring in this regard. And like I said, if you want to sign up for my email list and get some of the free tips and tricks that I offer on there every week— thanks, have a great Monday. Then sign up for that at BrittanyRatelle.com/newsletter and there's a little free creative business owner checklist where I kind of give a big roadmap in terms of what should you be thinking about in terms of protecting your business. What are kind of the different buckets, intellectual property, contracts, a little bit of employment, a little bit about registering your business, you know, what are the questions that you should be asking because I know that's kind of a big deal is you don't know what you don't know. So let's give you some questions, some talking points, so you can start exploring what you need to know and what you need to do to protect your business. So, okay guys, have a great Monday. Hope that you are killing it, you've got a bunch of stuff ready for this week for your small business, and we'll touch base next Monday. All right, thanks.