The Easiest And Cheapest Way To File Copyrights, Trademarks, Patents And Make Term Sheets

Foreign. That I haven't been able to vlog outdoors. I've been working hard on this new course. 247 in the car is the only time I can vlog. So I'll go outdoors again soon. Okay. I'm looking this way though. I want to talk today quickly about how to file for a copyright, a patent, a trademark, and also how to do a term sheet, all for a very, very low price. And it's quite easy to do. And so I'll explain copyright. So copyright basically means that if you write a book or you make a film or an online video or software or something you can't really, you can't touch like music, you can copyright it so that you own it. And you go to copyright.gov in the United States and I'll talk about international in a second. And what you do is you first of all do a search to see if nobody has copyrighted what you want to copyright. So for me, for example, copyrighted one of my courses called an entire MBA one course. I also copyrighted a couple of books I wrote as well. And you just do a search online and make sure nobody else has copyrighted that stuff before. Sorry about the glasses here. And then what you do is you either mail your book to the the copyright office which is listed on the website there, costs you about 35 bucks. And for an online video which is classified as a motion picture, you sen it in on a USB drive and it has to be the lowest resolution possible. It's painful because I send IT in at 720 and 1080p, high quality, higher quality format and they didn't accept it. So you send it in the lowest resolution possible onto a USB thumb drive and then what happens is they get back to you within six months or so and then you own it. Of course, you go onto the copyright.gov website first and you do a search to see if somebody else has already registered it or not. Now when, when it comes to trademarks and patents, you go to the same website in the United States, which is the USPTO.gov that's United States Patent and Trademark Office.gov and you do a search there as well to see if somebody has already patented or trademarked what you want to trademark or patent. Now a trademark is your brand name. Like the brand name for me from one of my courses is an entire MBA one course. I trademarked that so nobody can copy it. And you also have to trademark little slogans that you create as well. So for example, Udemy, which is a website I Teach on. They have this really cool campaign marketing campaign called Be Able. Be able to learn anything. And it's interesting because if you go to the USPTO.gov website and you do a search on that in the trademark search for Be Able, they actually trademarked that. It's pretty interesting. You can do that. Two words. It's neat. I'm sure Nike has Just do it, which is three words, of course. Now, when it comes to the cost for trademarking something, it can be a couple hundred dollars and it usually starts around 225. It's a little bit costly and sometimes you have to pay higher fees for them to do advanced searches to see if somebody's really using your brand. It gets complicated with patents. It's a little bit more expensive than that. It's more than a couple hundred bucks. And it can go much, much higher, too, depending on how complex the process is, what you're trying to. Now when you patent something, you're patenting a way of doing something. And so if you think about it, if you're in the biotech industry and you want to kind of patent the way that a certain biotech product works, it's really complicated and it costs a lot more than probably a couple hundred bucks. I know that for sure. And cost many, many thousands of dollars to do. Now, for international and for those that are in the United States that want to do a trademark, for example, over there's something called the Madrid Protocol, which was signed in the late 1980s, I think 1989, in which close to 100 countries will honor each other's trademarks, including China, United States, Serbia. I saw a bunch of others. You can look it up as well on Wikipedia, which is where I do all my research. I'm going to stop so I can look you now. Now, if you want to, if you want to ask more advanced questions about this sort of thing. I'm not a lawyer, so please don't just take my legal advice ever. But what I is I use this fantastic website and it's called legalzoom.com and I use them a lot for my international stuff as well, because I was clueless when it came to this stuff. And so what you can do is you can go to legalzoom.com and they can do all three of the aforementioned intellectual property stuff for you. The copyrights, the trademarks and the patents, they'll just charge you an extra maybe 100, 200 or 300 more on top of that, which might be worth it if you're really busy. And you don't know what to do. I use them the first time. I don't use them anymore though. But the Beautiful thing about LegalZoom is what you can do is if you want to talk to any lawyer for a personal matter, you can get a half hour call for $15. It's amazing. With a lawyer, 15 bucks, incredible. And for a business call, which I've done a bunch of them, it's $30 for half an hour, which is amazing. And I did a call over the past year with Copyright and Trademark Lawyer and I wanted to get my stuff, my courses and books and whatever, copyrighted and trademarked overseas. And the lawyer told me about the Madrid Protocol. But the law changes a lot overseas. And the only region that they couldn't help me with trademarking or copyrighting my stuff was the United Kingdom because of Brexit. There's just no precedent. The lawyers didn't really know what to do. So what I recommend is for those of you that have more complex questions about trademarks, patent and copyrights, whether you're in the United States or overseas, I really Recommend going to legalzoom.com by the way, I'm never affiliated with these companies. I never make a dime off this stuff. Just trying to help. So that's what I recommend doing now when it comes to. And by the way, if you're working at a company and you want to start your own company, just be careful about registering this stuff. Because the lawyers that work at your company or represent your company, whatever, they can always do a search online. So what you can do in that case is you can create your own separate company, like an LLC in a different name, whatever, and then set it up that way or in your. Someone in your family's name. Now when it comes to term sheets, so whenever you accept money from a venture capital firm to invest in your company or a high net worth investor, and I always recommend never getting a loan to start a company, okay? Always get equity investors, high net worth investors, or venture investors, whatever, to invest. And I say that because if you get a loan, the banks are chicken. And if you are just slightly late on paying back your loan, they'll come after you and they can take away your house and your car and it's just terrible. I've seen that happen before. It's terrible. And so if you're going to get a loan though, of course you want to register your company first as an LLC or C Corp or S Corp. Talk to a real lawyer first, obviously, or somebody on legalzoom.com. so that if, unfortunately, if you get sued or whatever, a bank comes after you one day, they can't take your stuff, your personal stuff, and you're protected. Now I want to pivot here and talk quickly about term sheets. So when you accept money from a venture capital firm or a high net worth investor and invest in your company, what happens is you have to sign what's called a term sheet. And it's not a legally binding document, but it's about 10 or 15 pages and it contains all the information that both parties need to know about each other before they make this investments. And then you look at the terms, that's why it's called term sheet. And it might say the A round, the B rounds, stock options might talk about that, the management team, where the company's located, all that stuff. And then you both sign it. Again, it's not legally binding. It's just list the basic terms. And then after the terms are signed and the term sheet has been executed or signed by both parties, then what happens is you give that term sheet to your lawyer and the investor gives that same term sheet to their lawyer. And the lawyers talk to each other and create tons more legal documents. Whatever. That's just how it works. Now before you go down that road, I want you to understand how a term sheet works. And I've got an amazing resource for you. There's a great law firm that I've used here in the Bay Area that represents the best tech companies and venture companies. It's called Wilson Sonsini. It's amazing. And I had one of the partners at the firm a guest lecture one of my classes that night a while back. And I learned a ton. And here's what I learned. And you can use this resource for free. It's amazing. Go to wsgr.com that's Wilsoni gr.com wsgr.com and you can search that website and there is what's called a term sheet generator for you. And it's just a really simplistic web process where they ask you a bunch of questions, you enter in a bunch of fields like your name and also how much money the other party is going to give you. What are some of the terms? And if the stuff is complicated, and it was really complicated for me, it still is, it's great because on WSGR's website, through this term sheet generator, what happens is you can click on any item and it will explain it to you more detail. Okay. Like options and all that stuff, whatever, preferred stock, common stock, preferred stock gets preferential treatment, common stock is lowest, low, etc. It'll explain all that. And then when you're done going through all those 46 steps, or however many steps there are, it automatically creates a PDF or Microsoft Word document for you. And it's a really good process for you to understand before you get lawyers involved. This stuff is not as complicated as you think it is. So the bottom line is to copyright or patent or trademark something. It's a couple hundred bucks all the way down to say, 35 bucks if you want to copyright something yourself. And if you don't want to do it yourself, if you don't have the time or the bandwidth or the understanding or patience, whatever. I really recommend using legalzoom.com and also when it comes to term sheets, to get a sample term sheet made for you for free, you can always go to WSGR.com or Wilson Sonsini's website and just do a search there for term sheets. So I hope this was helpful. If you if this was helpful and only if this is helpful, please click the like button and subscribe. I'm at the gym now. I'm looking forward to my workout. After I finish my workout, I always say to myself, God, I wish I didn't work out. Said no one ever. I feel great afterwards. Anyway, I need it. So I'll see you in my Nada. Thanks.