Kenny Chesney Here and Now

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 – How to Build a Personal Brand
2:03 – Establishing Your Branding
2:30 – How to Create Your Personal Story
3:14 – How to Develop Your Why and How in Branding
4:14 – The Three Brand Message Perspectives
5:45 – How to Title a Product or Service
7:55 – How to Launch a Brand – First Impressions
8:33 – Color Psychology in Branding
15:32 – How to Develop a Logo for Your Target Audience
19:07 – How to Test Your Brand for Success
22:19 – Using Clarity to Your Advantage
23:37 – How to Make Sure Your Tagline Solves a Problem
24:56 – The Best Ways to Get Brand Exposure
25:50 – The Power of Content Repurposing
31:06 – How to Position Yourself in the Marketplace
32:24 – Online Brand Exposure Consistency
36:39 – The 7 Touch-Points for Customer Engagement
37:58 – Ad Retargeting Explained
40:58 – Using Reviews as a Leveraging Tool in your Brand
45:08 – When to Rebrand
49:07 – Using Your Environment and Surroundings as Part of Your Brand

Rory Carruthers 0:04
Hey guys, welcome to the big picture business podcast this week on this episode, we’re gonna ask the question did Kenny Chesney steal our song? So it’s a very interesting thing that that happened. I was driving down the road one day listening to the radio, and I heard this Kenny Chesney song, come on. Now, this was this was back in May. And I was listening, listening and listening, I hit the chorus of the song, and it was like, wait a minute. That sounds like our song forever your song? Hmm. That Dominica and I wrote seven years before that. Now, what’s interesting also is that we promoted that song. And, and it actually ended up on country music radio.

Dominica Lumazar 0:53
Mm hmm.

Rory Carruthers 0:53
So we started asking this this question, did Kenny Chesney really steal our song, so we’re gonna let you decide that we’re gonna actually play that in a little bit. But we’re also going to be talking today about intellectual property, we’re

Dominica Lumazar 1:05
gonna cover a lot in this episode, I feel like it’s gonna be so, so important for so many of you. If you are in the stage where you’re just getting started, where you haven’t really thought, you know, a few months ahead, what happens when all of a sudden someone picks up your great ideas, intellectual property and what that means we’re talking about creations of your own mind, right? So inventions, names, brands, designs, images, if you’ve written a book, so anything literary, anything that’s artistic, that’s used for commerce, right, so that’s what we’re going to be talking about. And also we’re going to discuss the difference between tangible and intangible property. It’s a big episode, so get ready, but first, did Kenny Chesney steal our song? We’re gonna go ahead and play a clip from our song here and now that we put out into the world seven years ago, Okay, here we go.

Here and Now by Forever Yours

all right, and here is Kenny Chesney song that was really seven years after ours, here we go.

Rory Carruthers 2:43
Here and Now by Kenny Chesney

So something I want to point out is that Kenny Chesney did not actually write this song himself. This was one of the songs that was written for him. Now, this happens with a lot of people in the music industry, they either collaborate with other writers or they have songs sent to them, for them to perform, that someone wrote for them. It was a couple of other guys who wrote this song specifically for him because I looked it up because I was interested in how did this come about? So as I mentioned earlier, you know, our song had been played on Country radio, we kind of always felt it wouldn’t. It wasn’t supposed to have been played on Country radio, but the radio promotion company that we were working with, they insisted that it go on Country radio. Yeah, and that’s where it ended up, it became a top 100 songs, so it did get quite a bit of rotation at the time, the thing to think about is that ideas can get stuck in your mind. So one of those writers could have heard that song And years later written something similar, this happens quite often, actually. But it’s still an intellectual property issue. And for the for the copyright on the song. Technically, we could go after Kenny Chesney slash the writers of the song and and bring that to court for them to look at it now it’s very expensive to do that you have to hire lawyers and go through a whole process. Is it gonna be worth it? That’s you know, that’s where it’s debatable. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s not there. There’s a lot of situations where this happens in in the music industry where you know, someone a few years later will be like, You stole that melody from my song. Those lyrics for my song so you know, when you’re looking at a song What can you actually copyright and the melody of the vocals the the lead instrument You can copy or consider copy written intellectual property. The lyrics for the song are also but the chords underneath not so much. That’s why you can have so many songs with the same three or four chords that are playing the song. People aren’t going to sue you because you use those same four chords because you can’t really copyright that because what people do is they use that as the foundation they make different melodies on top, which is what the vocal line is singing. They use different lyrics etc. Now, one of the the most recent ones that that happened, this was a few years back, but it was between Joe Satriani and Coldplay. Mm hmm. The Coldplay had this huge song, Viva la Vida, and and Joe Satriani heard the song. And he recognized that the vocal melody was almost note for note exactly what he had written for one of his songs, which was called if I could fly, the song that Joe Satriani wrote was years and years before when Coldplay song came out, and he heard it and he said, you know, that is the same melody that I wrote on the guitar that was used for the vocals, Coldplay said, we’ve never heard that song, etc. But he came back and said, Well, you know, my song was a hit, it was played on radios all over the world. You may have heard it at some point without realizing it. And then, you know, created this. Now, Joe Satriani won. Yeah, so what did that mean? Well, they had to go to court, a judge had to evaluate was, was it close enough to to take in, when they did a back to back comparison, it was, like 95%, the same melody and same notes. They said it was close enough that they felt it was was taken from Joe Satriani. And now he gets paid a royalty for everything that Coldplay made on that song, in the past. And in the future. Yeah, it also means that because copyright and intellectual property extends just beyond just what you hear on the radio, is that when they play that song live, they have to pay him a royalty. Mm hmm. So it, it gets really deep into this stuff, especially in the music industry, because there’s so many ways that music is, is used if, if it’s used in a YouTube video. And if it’s used in a commercial, then he’s always going to get a little cut of that song.

Dominica Lumazar 7:29
Even if it’s like a few cents, but it’s something Yeah, luckily, yeah. When you sent me the Kenny Chesney song, because you were driving in your car, and I remember, like you, you, you said that you came home, and you immediately sent me the song and like, listen to this, right. And I listened to it. And my first reaction was like, Oh, my gosh, that’s so awesome. I took it seriously, I took it as a compliment. Like, if somewhere down the line, either, you know, his writers heard it, or if he heard it or whatever. Wow.

Rory Carruthers 8:01
You know, he still had to approve it, you know, even though they had had written it and and all of that, that using a slightly different melody. Same words, you know, but general ideas is it’s very close. Yeah. And it’s in the exact same placement in the song as where we wrote it.

Dominica Lumazar 8:17
Yes,

Rory Carruthers 8:18
ma’am. Back, same starting point, like everything of how the course hits. There’s a lot of similarities. Is it exact? No. So that’s where it could become a little bit debatable in a courtroom. But we feel we would have a pretty decent case on on that one.

Dominica Lumazar 8:32
Oh, absolutely. Especially because we can mark it very clearly on when we released it. And the fact that it played on the radio, and it was top 100 and all that. So we we could build a case now, in my case, and just like sitting here and thinking about it. I’m not, I don’t feel today, we could change our mind later on down the line, but I don’t feel like it’s worth my energy, our energy to try to go after something like this. I feel like you know, Kenny Chesney is putting good music out there great if we had some influence on that awesome. But here’s the thing that does upset me, and that comes down to the fact that YouTube completely just squashed our promotion for this song. And if that had not happened, we could be in a totally different position right now with the song It could still be playing it could have gone on to do more. I want to show you guys the back end of the YouTube channel that we uploaded our here and now music video to because when you go right now, let me just show you here when you go right now it doesn’t look very impressive. I mean, it has like 807 views, you know, and that doesn’t really make much sense. How do you

Rory Carruthers 9:45
have a top 100 song with 807 views, right?

Dominica Lumazar 9:47
They don’t and I’m going to show I’m going to show you why and what the heck happened. Okay, so here we are on the back end of our forever yours YouTube channel. Now you can see right here there are two spots here. Where we uploaded? Okay, the video The first time we uploaded the video it was published April 15 2013. And it got 259,000 views. Now, for some reason it was removed because they claimed YouTube claimed that it went against the terms of service. Okay, it went against

Rory Carruthers 10:23
Which we will explain in a second. Yeah. Oh, we reuploaded it

Dominica Lumazar 10:27
reuploaded on May 5, okay, because we contested it. And they said, just reupload it. Okay. And then it got 556,000 views. Okay. And then guess what happened? They took it down.

Rory Carruthers 10:43
Yeah. And you’ll see that if you’re, if you’re watching this on the video, that the third time we uploaded it was August 20. Now what happened between May 5 and August 20? Well, and really what happened between April 15 and August 20. Okay, so we essentially went into this battle with YouTube, of trying to figure out why they kept removing our video, it was getting flagged,

Dominica Lumazar 11:14
and it kept getting flagged, whether it was a competitor, or whether I don’t, we still don’t have a full understanding

Rory Carruthers 11:21
jealous boyfriend. yet.

Dominica Lumazar 11:24
The first time the video went down, it said that it had pornographic content. It’s a lot of my face, like I get that. But there’s nothing like pornographic happening. So this piece is so so so frustrating where we rely on companies like Google, YouTube to help us push out these campaigns. And this was a real, like shot in the gut. Honestly, when this happened, it was like, come on, man.

Rory Carruthers 11:51
timed everything without radio promotion. Yeah, and, and all the other ads and promotion that we were running at the time. And you can see how it worked. I mean, the radio promotion work because they got top 100, the YouTube promotion work because we were getting 10s, hundreds of 1000s of views of the video. But there comes a point where you run out of budget. Yeah. And you run out of momentum of something being new and interesting,

Dominica Lumazar 12:17
right? And like how much when when something hits top 100, you get one shot to either keep it going or it just falls completely off the planet. And unfortunately, due to budget restrictions and all that stuff, and for you to just not willing to work with us on this. Yeah, we we gave it our best shot, and we re uploaded it, and it didn’t get taken down. And now it has a measly 800 views. Now granted, we

Rory Carruthers 12:42
didn’t run any more promotions.

Dominica Lumazar 12:44
Now we were done. Yeah. Yeah. But it’s a great song. I sang it for my sister’s wedding. And it’s, you know, I’m just the fact that we’re able to even like talk about this on the podcast and and see what Kenny Chesney put out. It’s like, Well, okay, so with the melody that I came up with, and the lyrics that we came up with, and all this stuff, like, okay, I mean, at least it’s still out there. But it’s still like, oh, it stings a little bit, you know, because of all the time and effort we put into this. Yeah, it’s not easy to put your heart out there and then have you to kill it. On the YouTube side of things to protect your intellectual property, if something comes up, you can go back you can contest it. YouTube, in in more recent years have become a lot better at people actually looking at it manually. It’s not just like robots looking at stuff so much anymore. It’s actual employees. And I actually see that there is a button here on YouTube now that says Like, resubmit, and I just might do it. Because you never know, you know, it’d be interesting to see what, what we learn now. Okay, so real quick, I want to just cover the difference between tangible and intangible property. So Rory’s and my song is intangible, right? It’s not something someone’s gonna hold online. Now, we still we sold albums, like physical albums, so that’s considered tangible. But in this case, what we’re talking about with YouTube, it’s intangible property, so anyone could technically do what they want with it, they could put it into their own YouTube videos. They can, you know, steal clips of it. But But Rory and I were smart enough when we we made sure to copyright all of our intellectual property, all of our songs right. Now, let’s talk about the difference between intellectual property and copyright. Rory you want to speak to that a little bit.

Rory Carruthers 14:32
Intellectual Property Law exists in order to protect the creators of the information and and covers the areas of copyright and trademark law and patents. So intellectual property is basically like an umbrella term that encompasses both copyright and intellectual property such as trademarks and patents and inventions,

Dominica Lumazar 14:55
right. So

Rory Carruthers 14:56
what we’re looking at is saying that intellectual property is the Overall term, but how you actually go about doing copyrights, how you do trademarks, patents and inventions is, they all have their different paths and processes that you have to go through in order to be protected.

Dominica Lumazar 15:12
Right. And so there’s three main types of intellectual property, right? Like we’re just mentioned, you’ve got the copyright, trademark, and patents. Okay. So those, those are important distinctions to know what your intellectual property is, what you’ve created, and then how to break it down and categorize it so that you can get it registered, and to protect yourself.

Rory Carruthers 15:32
Yeah, so for example, we can copyright our music, right, but we don’t copyright, the band name, we trademark the band name. And so you can have trademarks, you can have also service marks as well. But basically, you know, when you’re when you’re going for copyright, that relates to a larger group of information, such as, like, songs, lyrics, the content of a book. But when you’re doing trademarks, it’s usually more around like titles and brand names.

Dominica Lumazar 16:07
Yeah. And then patents, that all comes down to, if you’re developing software, if you’re developing product, if it’s a gadget, something where it has steps in which you built it, very, very clear steps on how to do that. Now, here’s, here’s another way that you can protect yourself, okay. I think patents are important. However, I have to just say you should be a little bit weary about doing a patent. Just because once you actually submit it, it’s on the internet, it’s out there for everyone to view. So I would make certain that you have very clear steps on what to do next, once you’ve submitted the patent, if you’re going to go manufacturing, depending on what you’re going to do with it, because anyone could look at your patent could take every single step that you’ve included in the write up to get it registered, and make one or two small minor tweaks, and they wouldn’t be going against what you’ve already tried to patent. If you’ve ever watched Shark Tank, you’ve probably heard a lot of people say patent pending. And that’s because there’s so many patents out there that people have to go dig through the stack of patents in a very similar category that you’ve submitted it for to make sure that it is actually unique to itself. And during that time, anyone can just swoop right in, check out your patent, even if it’s pending, it’ll say pending online. And they can again, just make one or two small tweaks and basically take it for their own. And they’ll run with it and sometimes further and faster. And it’s all about who’s the first to market. So patents are great. Just have a plan way in advance before you submit that. Yeah, no, I

Rory Carruthers 17:44
also want to mention around trademarks, going through that process, there’s a lot of misinformation out there, there’s these companies that will say all you have to do is fill out this paperwork, you you pay this fee, and you submit it. And that’s not exactly true. If you’re lucky, you can submit it and and if there’s no other trademarks out there, then you can get it passed. But if you haven’t done the research, and they come back and say, well, there’s already this trademark that exists, then what’ll happen is they’ll send it back, say, we’re keeping all your money, you know, your 500 or $1,000, you just submitted to us, and you can’t do anything about it, you don’t get your trademark because already exists. So there’s research that goes into this, you know, I highly recommend working with a lawyer who specializes in this. In fact, in the future, we are going to bring on one of my clients who actually specializes in this type of information, we are going to interview her on the podcast to go deeper into this because this is her specialty. That’s what she wrote her book around, actually, we’ll put a link to the book in the description below. You know, if you’re if you’re needing that information right now, you can get started there. But we are going to do a full episode that really takes her as the expert and goes through each of these stages of how to approach it.

Dominica Lumazar 19:02
That’s going to be great. I’m looking forward to that. always more to learn, even though I feel like I’ve got a good handle on this stuff. There is always new laws that come out.

Rory Carruthers 19:09
And yeah, we’re not lawyers. So

Dominica Lumazar 19:11
no.

Rory Carruthers 19:13
Right when she is and that’s her specialty, right? She She does a ton of high level stuff that you know, we’ll get into when we interview her but it’s just nuts the stuff you need to know and that you don’t know. And and that you probably won’t find, you know, and then you know, if you need someone to work with, I highly recommend her because she’ll just take care of you and get it done. Excellent. We’re gonna have her on the podcast. Her name is Cheryl Hodgson. And she’ll go over all of this information, a lot more detail. But what we want to do right now is share with you seven effective ways to protect your IP.

Dominica Lumazar 19:48
And by IP, we’re not talking about your computers. We’re talking about your intellectual property.

Rory Carruthers 19:54
Well, that would be IT

Dominica Lumazar 19:55
well IP address.

Rory Carruthers 19:58
Oh yeah. Good point.

Dominica Lumazar 20:03
Okay, so number one, what we just talked about, you really want to make sure that you’re going to register your copyrights, your trademarks, like I mentioned, be weary of patents, make sure you have a plan in

Rory Carruthers 20:13
place. The other thing is you want to register your your business or your product and your domain names, you want to make sure that you’ve got everything in alignment for what the brand name is that you’re coming up with.

Dominica Lumazar 20:24
Absolutely. As the branding geek. I’m always encouraging my clients 100%, you’ve got to make sure that you are protecting your brand. In fact, I got a quick story. One of my first businesses was called Lovebird chocolates. And the chocolate, we got it into Whole Foods Market. super exciting. We got it in there just before Valentine’s Day makes sense. Chocolate, you know, love whole deal. I walked in to Whole Foods Market only to find that over their bakery section. They had my logo that said, Love bird Valentine. They took out the word chocolate, but it was my logo. The only things that were different was the birds were yellow. My birds were blue in the logo. And they took out the word chocolate, same font, everything else, and I just couldn’t believe it. I was shocked. I was sitting there going, are you kidding me? And like Rory had mentioned earlier, sometimes people see things and they just go Oh, yeah, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen this before. But it just came to mind. So I don’t feel like it was malicious by any means at all. It was just the artists that they had in that department, hands down, saw the logo, and I showed the logo to the woman in the specialty food section of the shop. And she was like, Whoa, you’re right. That’s your logo. But it was just really uncomfortable. Like, what are you going to take that down? So they compromise with me, and they put my chocolate up front and center in the bakery section to kind of go hand in hand and I was like, Okay, fine. That works. We’ll just leave it at that. But it’s incredible how logos gets stolen all the time without people who like the ones who have stolen it haven’t even realized that they have it’s just something they’ve seen. Similar to the Kenny Chesney thing, like maybe you heard it somewhere, you know, it’s just it’s, it’s amazing how how the mind works that way. Right. And

Rory Carruthers 22:19
you know, we actually had two other things with our forever yours logos.

Dominica Lumazar 22:24
Yes, the perfume company. Remember that?

Rory Carruthers 22:27
Yeah, that was crazy. Because we we design multiple logos for forever yours. Mm hmm. So we had all of these different logos that we were using, we had a text based one, we had scripty ones, we had like a big Superman type logo. And we just started seeing people ripping him off.

Dominica Lumazar 22:46
Yeah, left and right. It was non stop. And I’d never seen these logos before. And then as soon as we put out into the world, it was like, wait, what we had an infinity symbol, and you can’t really trademark the infinity symbol, right? It was a perfume called forever yours. And their logo had this infinity symbol. And it was our exact same staggered font. Exact same. It was as if we put it out.

Rory Carruthers 23:11
Exactly, yeah. And there was another band that stole our logo. They had a different name, but remember it had FY in it.

Dominica Lumazar 23:19
And it and it was in the Superman form, right?

Rory Carruthers 23:22
Yeah, I’m pretty sure was in the Superman form on that we got

Dominica Lumazar 23:25
about that. Oh, man.

Rory Carruthers 23:27
Yeah, that was some pop band that just came out in the last couple of years.

Dominica Lumazar 23:31
And they had like millions, like hundreds of millions of fans.

Rory Carruthers 23:34
Yeah, was isn’t. And based off of using our our logos. Then there was a band that came out and called themselves forever yours. Their music got attached to our music on Spotify on on our

Dominica Lumazar 23:50
iTunes. That’s right. That’s right. So anytime someone typed in for yours, they were coming up. But our songs were embedded in their stuff. It was weird.

Rory Carruthers 23:59
Yeah. So we had to go through this whole process of getting their stuff removed from us and saying like they are not our band. Yeah. And yeah, and it was like, it was just so bad. Like I would never I feel bad saying this, but like, I would never want that music to be associated with us. Like it just it was just so not what we do.

Dominica Lumazar 24:22
Well, if I remember correctly, it was pretty dark. Like it did the music. Yeah, it was just it didn’t make any sense. Like, here we are talking about like you are enough here and now like Suicide Prevention Awareness stuff. And they’re talking about like the super dark topics. So yeah, that was a very necessary let’s not associate so yeah, Anyways, back to what we were talking about, which is the seven effective ways to protect your your intellectual property. So we’ve covered number one is register copyright trademark Okay, number two, register your business products, domain names, numbers. Three, we want to create confidentiality here. So nondisclosure agreements, licensing contracts for your employees or partners. So we haven’t really talked about that side yet, right? So it’s one thing for you to come up with this fabulous idea, and then to get it trademarked and patent and all that. But if you’re doing this, as a business, and you have employees, how does that all work, you know, and that can get a little sticky sometimes, because you want to keep all this information to yourself, and be quite private about it until you’re ready to launch it into the world. So it’s so important to understand how contracts actually work. And if you have no idea, I would be doing some research. And I would be hiring some some legal counsel to help you navigate that

Rory Carruthers 25:45
some of the ways that you can you look at this is when you create your non disclosure and confidentiality agreements, usually it’s for a certain period of time. So and you may have to renew these, depending on who you’re working with. If you’re hiring contractors to do work, you may be paying them for that what they create. And then you own it completely. Other times, like if you’re working with a photographer, for example, they may still own the right to that image, and you just may be able to use it. Mm hmm. There’s different ways that that copyright is used in these different situations. So you got to know what it is that you’re getting into. Again, you know, hire a lawyer to work through this, especially if it’s something that’s really important, or just learn the right terminology so that you can have a proper conversation about this about this stuff. But when you’re, when you’re working for a larger company, you might run into this. So say, say you work for apple? Well, Apple has in their contracts, and many other companies do this as well, is where what they’ll do is they will make it so that anything that you create while you’re an employee of the company, whether on or off the clock with them during that period, where you’re employed, they own whatever that is, you cannot go and create something on your own. But yeah, you couldn’t go create an app on your own while you’re an employee of the company. And

Dominica Lumazar 27:18
well, you could but they own it.

Rory Carruthers 27:20
Yeah, exactly. They would own the right to it. If you know if your The other thing is that even if you try to do that in secret, and they find out that you were creating it, during that time period you were employed, even though you didn’t release it. Mm hmm. They could still come after you for that. Yep, absolutely. And they have the money, they have the lawyers to win. So they will, yeah. So you know, really pay attention to stuff like that, know what you’re signing, when anytime you’re signing a contract, and know that you have the right contracts in place, for your for what you’re doing in your business.

Dominica Lumazar 27:58
If you’re the business owner, in this case, protect yourself, but also protect your employees. If someone’s working for you. And they want to go create an app or they’ve come up with something. Give them the opportunity to do something with it. Don’t be jerk help other people like they’ll help you help them. It could work out very well. But yes, know what you’re signing, know what you’re asking people to sign. I would never just go to Google and download like, I don’t know, confidentiality agreement and not read it. It’s you know, like, make sure you know what the heck is happening. super important. Yeah,

Rory Carruthers 28:26
a lot of that stuff won’t hold up in court.

Dominica Lumazar 28:29
When I receive a nondisclosure agreement. And I go to sign it, I’m, you know, I realized that nine times out of 10, it really is like a blanket, just, here’s a random document someone thinks they need to give me and I know that it’s not, like legit. And that’s one of the first things I actually talk about with new clients is like, let’s go over some contract stuff here. Because this would not hold up. Like I’m not a jerk, I’m not gonna go share your personal things. However, this is just a piece of paper with my signature on it. And it’s not, this isn’t gonna do much. So yes, please protect yourself, protect employees, contractors, all that jazz.

Rory Carruthers 29:05
Yeah, actually, you know, the contract that we use in my business is called a mutual non disclosure agreement, because it’s beneficial for both parties protects everyone. We’re not going to steal the information that you’re sharing with us. We’re not going to, you know, use that for our own business practices. But also, you can’t poach our employees or our contractors from us, because you’re going to, you know, know who they are and be working with them. And a few people have tried, you know, but luckily, I have such good relationships with my team, and business partners and stuff that they go. Yeah, this ain’t cool. I don’t want to work with you anymore because of that.

Dominica Lumazar 29:42
Yeah. I mean, that’s happened just to us a couple times. Yeah. It’s just, it will

Rory Carruthers 29:46
happen because people don’t don’t look at what they’re signing. They don’t understand it. And they think they can just do whatever they want.

Dominica Lumazar 29:53
Yeah. And if you feel pressured, if someone’s like, here, just sign this real quick. No. Take the time. Yeah, people in the long run, people will respect you more for taking the time to really review. Because they know you’re, you know, serious.

Rory Carruthers 30:08
Yeah. Don’t don’t sign anything under distress. Yeah. Like, that’s, that’s huge, because people get put into situations where they feel they’re forced to do this. And this can be in business, it can be anywhere in life.

Dominica Lumazar 30:19
Mm hmm.

Rory Carruthers 30:20
So really, you know, really like, think about that, if you’re feeling like, this situation isn’t good. And that you need outside counsel, please get it.

Dominica Lumazar 30:29
You can also ask if if someone is asking you to sign an NDA, you can say, Hey, can you walk me through this? And just have them point to it and say, What does this mean? What is this clause mean? And just talk it through. I’ve had, I’ve had a few of my clients do that. And I love that, I love that they asked me to do that. It shows that they actually care. So anyways, Okay, moving on. Number four on our list of seven effective ways to protect your IP, implement security measures. So what I mean by that, I mean, we’ve we’ve already discussed the contract aspect, make sure you put a password protection on your on your computer, you know, make sure that no one has your, your email password, things like that, like just be smart. Change your passwords regularly, extra security measures to know who’s logging in and out at different times. So you can have a record and see what people are actually doing in that type of setting.

Rory Carruthers 31:21
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s really, we ran into this, and in the music industry a lot where then because I worked with a lot of bands, and, you know, produced a lot of music. People were always scared that their music was gonna get leaked before they were ready to put it out. And this is still a huge thing, because they lose that momentum that they’ve built up. Mm hmm. And that anticipation and the ability to monetize it, because it just gets put out there. Yeah, so you have to, this is the same thing with any type of product like that, you know, some companies will intentionally leak little things about their, their stuff is part of their marketing strategy. But they’re, they’re not, they’re not putting their like real intellectual property out there. Right? Occasionally will happen where bands will put their music out and just be like, okay, whatever, but that’s part of the marketing strategy. They’re trying something out. But in the majority of things, everything is under wraps and a lot of times in certain contracts. I mean, you could if something gets leaked, I this happens with movies as well.

Dominica Lumazar 32:23
Where they go live. Yeah,

Rory Carruthers 32:24
before they go live. If you leave something, you know, you may be on the hook for like a million dollar penalty.

Dominica Lumazar 32:30
Yeah, yeah, that’s, that’s no joke. That’s something to not mess around with.

Rory Carruthers 32:34
So you really have to be careful about what you say who you say to, you know, when you’re dealing with this with with information that is, you know, protected.

Dominica Lumazar 32:43
Talk about serious mismanagement, the most recent one that comes to mind is Scooter Braun and Taylor Swift, right? He he swooped in and bought her entire catalog for millions of dollars. And she was never given the opportunity to buy her own music back to get the rights to her own songs, which she wrote. Yeah. And that is insane. So, yeah, again, back to know what you’re signing was just

Rory Carruthers 33:10
like, how the Beatle Beatles didn’t own their own music? Yep. Michael Jackson owned it.

Dominica Lumazar 33:17
I know.

Rory Carruthers 33:18
I think Well, back after, after Michael died, but, you know, like, That’s huge. Like, you know, and I’ve seen this wave of people, just this has been in the last few weeks, selling their catalogs and selling their catalogs. I mean,

Dominica Lumazar 33:34
Dylan.

Rory Carruthers 33:35
Yeah, it was Bob Dylan. Neil Young sold half his catalogue, Fleetwood Mac, all their solo songs for I think, was Mick Fleetwood, who sold all the all of his solo songs off, you know, why are they doing this, well Because they’re making more money selling that off than they are off of streams?

Dominica Lumazar 33:55
Exactly. Like how many times with their songs have to play? So Bob Dylan, he sold off over 600 songs for 300 million. Yeah, that’s a significant chunk of change

Rory Carruthers 34:07
it. Well, and you think about it, how many streams would it take to sell $300 million worth of music? And then to you know, that’s that that money is split between so many different people,

Dominica Lumazar 34:24
different people? Yeah.

Rory Carruthers 34:26
Right. So when he can just say, Well, I own this music, I’m just gonna sell it off. It’s worth a lot because of the place that he’s at. It doesn’t help new artists, you’re just starting in that place. But for established artists who’ve been around a long time, they have that opportunity right now. And it seems like a lot of them are taking it up because they’re like, we don’t see how we can long term make that type of money off of it now. streams are not the only way you make money in music, you know that. They can license it for commercials and movies and things like that. So they do get big paydays from stuff like that. But still, you know if you’re offer $300 million now. versus, you know, the potential to make, you know, millions in the future, maybe even more than 300 million. Most people take the Now,

Dominica Lumazar 35:07
of course, and Bob Dylan is 79 years old.

Rory Carruthers 35:10
Yeah, you know what I mean? So you gotta have much longer to wait for Yeah.

Dominica Lumazar 35:13
Where are you at in life? How about you enjoy the fruits of your labor? Okay, so number five on our list here. I don’t think that this is the case, always. But a lot of professionals say to avoid joint ownership of intellectual property, okay, now, this is not the case all the time. But it’s so important to know who you’re getting in bed with, so to speak, right? Like when you go into a business venture with someone, it’s like a marriage in and of itself, it’s, you got to know who you’re talking to. Like, for example, I trust Rory wholeheartedly, like if we if we decide to, you know, patent something, and if we went into business together, which were already in business together, but if we decide to do something new, I would trust, whatever it’s all going to work out, it’s going to be great. Because that’s who Rory is, I would never screw me over. We’ve known each other for over a decade now, you know, so just know who you’re getting in business with, that’s the big piece there. If something new is on the table, and someone’s like, Hey, I, you know, just met this person two weeks ago, we’ve got this great idea, and everything’s gonna work out, I would slow the roll on that one be very, very cautious.

Rory Carruthers 36:24
Both of us have gotten burned, pretty big time,

Dominica Lumazar 36:27
so big time.

Rory Carruthers 36:28
My record label ended up crashing after I’d built it up to be, you know, international sales all over the world, like we’re doing really well. And then I brought on a business partner who was supposed to really help take it to the next level. And he just tanked everything.

Dominica Lumazar 36:46
That’s so miserable.

Rory Carruthers 36:48
Yeah,

Dominica Lumazar 36:49
that’s so disappointing.

Rory Carruthers 36:50
And then I got left with, you know, 10s of 1000s of dollars of debt, because of him, right. And so you get you get in these situations, and you learn from them. Yeah, and this is, you know, why a lot of people say don’t have joint ownership now, Dominica, I have joint ownership over every song we’ve ever written together. That, that becomes you can’t really get around unless you hire someone out for work for hire, you know, you can, you can go and say, you know, I’m going to hire this guitarist to play on this song, and pay them a flat rate to do and a lot. This happens a lot in Nashville, with studio musicians where the musician will come in, you pay him a couple $100, they’ll write what they write, they don’t own any of it. The you know, the person who wrote the song owns it, and they just pay them that flat rate. And they sign a contract and say, you know, whatever you gave us is ours. And we can use it however we want. And they’re happy to do that. Because they get they get paid up front, they don’t have to wait around to see if they will actually make money. If the song is going to be a hit or not, you know, all these things, there’s a lot of benefits to that side as well. But the point is, is just know who you’re getting into business with and be very cautious about it. Not everyone has the best of intentions.

Dominica Lumazar 38:06
Unfortunately, yeah, that’s where we’re at greed is deep for a lot of

folks.

So be aware of that. Okay, next up, number six, we’re getting closer here. Number six is keep it quiet. So you’ve got something super cool. Don’t go post it on social media, think these things through, I wouldn’t even go tell certain family members, you know who the gossip is in your family. I know who it is my family. You just gotta be gotta be quiet about these things until you’re ready until you have a plan in place. And then you can blast it out into the world. But until there’s a plan, Hmm, I’d keep it quiet.

Rory Carruthers 38:44
Yeah, and if you have a mentor that you’re working with, to kind of help you through some of this stuff, you know, well, first off, you’ve probably got a nondisclosure agreement with them, or you should if you don’t, but like they’re there to help you sort through that. So that’s one place where you’re, you know, you’re gonna have to be willing to open up. But what Dominica is saying is do not just go and share this with just random people, because word spreads very quickly. And you may not even realize how quickly it spreads. So you want to make sure that you’re the intellectual property, the stuff that you’re creating that either exists physically or doesn’t exist, it’s just a concept in the mind is not stolen. Okay. Now, this brings up another thing that I wanted to talk about about intellectual property because and the creation of ideas.

Dominica Lumazar 39:37
Oh, yeah, you there’s like a scientific thing around this right. So

Rory Carruthers 39:41
yeah, so in this was like, a month, two months ago. Yeah. Where Shawn Mendez came out with a live video on live concert on Netflix. And I just happened to be playing it in the background while I was doing some work and this song comes on and I start listening to it. I’m like, Oh, that’s cool. Wait, I’ve heard that before. Wait, I wrote it. And I picked up my guitar. And I started playing it. And it was like almost note for note rhythm, like timing, everything was exactly the same. Now, I had written that five years prior.

Dominica Lumazar 40:23
And he sent it to me.

Rory Carruthers 40:24
And I was the only person heard it because we were just started creating some demos. And, and I sent her like seven or eight demos of songs, ideas to choose from. Yeah. And that was the only time I’d always like, really loved the riff that I’d written. But we didn’t actually, you know, move forward with it. So it was just sitting on my computer, I went, and I looked at the date that I had recorded it. And I knew I had written it about a year before that even and, and that was, so I recorded I think it was in 2016. I’d written in 2015. And, you know, but Dominica and I are the only ones who’ve ever heard it. And I brought it up, you know, I, I called Dominica. And we were on zoom. Right? Yeah. And I was like, Okay, here’s this from this music video. And I played it for 30 seconds. And then I played my and she’s like, holy crap, that is 100% exact,

Dominica Lumazar 41:20
there is nothing different about it. Seriously, not a thing, like the Kenny Chesney thing. It’s like, there’s some differences, for sure. But this is like dead on. But we never did anything with it.

Rory Carruthers 41:34
We never did anything. There’s no way that Shawn Mendez Yeah, could ever have heard this. So what this brings about is there’s the scientific theory called multiple independent discovery. And this happens a lot in the scientific community, because you have scientists working on trying to solve a problem. And a lot of times, what will happen is that multiple scientists will solve it right around the same time. And so that’s where this theory came up. And there’s been, you know, quite a lot of proof of this happening. They say that Edison, you know, created a light bulb, but, you know, there was other people who actually had invented it, you know, right around the same time as well. But he was the first to market. So he was the first to market and he was able to get the patent all these things, right. So, you know, there’s a lot that goes into this, but you have to realize that sometimes sometimes it’s just, you know, there’s like some higher level of stuff where people are creating ideas, and they’re creating the same type of idea.

Dominica Lumazar 42:38
Mm hmm. It’s like out there in the ethers. Yeah. Mm hmm. Well, that’s happened to us a couple times, you thought of the friggin iPhone.

Rory Carruthers 42:46
I thought of the iPad.

Dominica Lumazar 42:48
Okay, so so you, you thought of the iPad, I thought of coffee sprinkles. But it’s amazing how you you think of these things, then all of a sudden, you’re, you know, your inbox says, check out this new product. You’re like, that’s my product that I never did anything. But somebody else did.

Rory Carruthers 43:08
Well, yeah. And then, you know, there’s this new show on Netflix. It’s called something about leftovers. It’s a cooking show, like all using leftovers.

Dominica Lumazar 43:16
Oh, I gotta watch that.

Rory Carruthers 43:18
And, you know, this guy was talking about how, you know, he’s creating his own YouTube channel or something about going into people’s houses and just cooking with what they have. I had that idea. 20 years ago was called grandma’s kitchen. What?

Dominica Lumazar 43:33
Another missed opportunity. Yeah. But, but here we are, right. But

Rory Carruthers 43:37
you know, like, it’s, it’s an idea. I never acted on it. You know, we’ve talked about this before, if you don’t take action, like things don’t happen. It was an idea. I am, you know, not professional chef, if I was, that’s what I would have done. I actually came up with the idea for one of my friends who was a professional chef, but he decided to go into the military instead of going that route. And but you, you know, you can come up with these ideas. But if you don’t have the, the protections behind it, you can’t do anything. You can’t, you can’t go after people, you know, if they steal your ideas or anything like that, because you didn’t put in the work to, to protect it in the first place. Mm hmm. You know, so document everything that’s like one of my biggest things is, as you’re going through all all of the music that we record, I have all the session files and their date stamped of when that was created. So if so, we’ll go into a courtroom, we can say Well, look, these are when these files were created. Versus, you know, when this you know, was it filed with the Copyright Office, which you know, our stuff was, Do you have proof that it was in our case posted on YouTube with the music video? Do you know like we could go through list by list by list we have all this documented proof that this existed at a specific time, and was even created before When we actually released it,

Dominica Lumazar 45:01
we also have videos to when we were in the studio recording like the original sessions. I actually I found them just the other day. I have voice memos on an old iPhone of us working out the melody for hear and now. Yeah. And so yeah, we have all that. Which is pretty cool. It’s kind of funny to go back, there was a few different directions. We could have taken that song, but what we landed on, Kenny Chesney really liked so

Oh, my goodness.

Rory Carruthers 45:34
Oh, we have one more, don’t we?

Dominica Lumazar 45:35
We did we have one more?

Rory Carruthers 45:36
Yeah, yes. So we, we promised seven, we’re giving you seven. But we’ve thrown in a few other tips in the middle here.

Dominica Lumazar 45:41
Yeah, you know us. Number seven, is if you’re working in an office setting, and it can be zoom office style. But if you have some intellectual property, or you have presented a new product, whatever it might be, make sure that you are putting separate teams in different areas if you’re building this out as a company. So if you’re building out a piece of software, for example, make it so that one team doesn’t have what they fully need for the other one to come together and to potentially steal. You know, so be strategic about how much information you give to one team or one person and be selective of who has all the information. Again, it’s just it all goes back to protecting yourself, putting contracts in place security measures, keep your mouth shut until you’re ready.

Rory Carruthers 46:34
Right. And you know, this was just the other day, I don’t remember if it was a discussion with you or someone else, where someone was trying to figure out the ingredients to a product. And they called up the company and said, Well, you know what’s in your product? They’re like, we can’t tell you, like

Dominica Lumazar 46:52
doesn’t say it on the back of the product.

Rory Carruthers 46:55
The general whatever the case was there, it was like a proprietary thing. And they’re like only two people in the whole company know what the ingredients are for? This, like the specific details of it.

Dominica Lumazar 47:08
Of course, how many times did we get asked about that with love for chocolates with the vegan and raw truffles? What is the secret? And I would just tell people it was love. didn’t leave it at that. And there’s a lot of people that tried to recreate it.

Rory Carruthers 47:23
Oh, yeah. Because that’s the thing. Like you still have to put certain ingredients on packaging. Yeah. And but you don’t have to put all of them and they don’t know the brands, the ingredients. They don’t know the brands of ingredients. They don’t know the levels of how much is in there. It everything adds up. I mean, if you’ve ever made like pasta and use the different sauce than you normally use can taste completely different. Just by having that one different thing.

Dominica Lumazar 47:49
Yeah. Yeah. So separate teams, reject yourself. Yeah. And here, you know, what, when when all was said and done, right? Like I mentioned, a little while ago, I could have been super upset over the Kenny Chesney thing, I could have been super upset over the fact that our brand has been stolen multiple times for forever yours, I chose the high road and just said, Wow, that’s such a compliment. It’s a compliment to the fact that we have built a very strong multiple, very, very strong brands that are recognized whether people realize that it’s our brands or not, they’ve internalized it, and they’ve done something with it. And so to me, I look at that and go that’s solid, we’re very good at marketing. So that’s that piece of it. The other piece, though, is you have to know how to respond if someone has stolen your intellectual property, right. And so, first bit of advice, I say, stay calm and take your personal emotion out of it. Like when I walked into Whole Foods, and I saw their bakery section, they had my logo, right, I could have flipped out. But instead I took a deep breath and I was like, Okay, what kind of, you know, spin can we do here? Like, I don’t want to be upset about it. So what can we do to make it like fair, let’s move forward with this. Okay. So stay calm, take a deep breath. And then gather your factual evidence with dates, like we’re talking about how Rory has, has categorized everything for us. You know, and if someone actually stole like, all of our lyrics for hear and now, that’d be real obvious. And we would want 100% take that to court like no no no

Rory Carruthers 49:30
now Yeah, if it was exactly the same or something. Yeah,

Dominica Lumazar 49:33
it’d be a whole different story. Yeah. So make sure that as you’re moving forward, if you’re planning on developing products, brands, services, all that stuff, make sure it’s dated. Okay? That’s important. And then if if you’re faced with a situation like Rory and I are with the Kenny Chesney situation, just decide if it’s worth pursuing. I can’t speak for Rory. But for me, there’s a lot more money to be made with what I’m currently doing. I don’t think it’s. I don’t think it’s a good use of our time, our energy and our money to pursue that.

Rory Carruthers 50:05
Well I’m always cost cautious with legal stuff and my reason for that in spending a ton of money on legal counsel unless it’s a very very much needed is because I had a family friend I grew up with who was a you know, multi, multi multi millionaire, but he ended up completely broke living on church donations, because he got so mad about being taken advantage of that he just tried keep to keep suing this doctor who kept screwing him over. Hmm. And it drained every dollar and cent he had and and the lawyers won out, he was left with nothing at the end of his life.

Dominica Lumazar 50:46
And so that’s so sad.

Rory Carruthers 50:49
I’m always a bit cautious with that stuff you because your ego and your desire to be right. could potentially ruin you. Yeah, yeah, gosh, though. Kind of heavy. But let’s go back to Kenny Chesney, we actually want to know what your thoughts are. Yeah, you know, if Kenny Chesney stole our song or not, we’ll leave it up to you guys. And, you know, leave leave messages in the comments. If you’re listening on YouTube. You know, reach out to us send us an email. We’d love to hear your thoughts, you know, and we hope you enjoy the songs. I mean, both are great songs. So

Dominica Lumazar 51:23
yeah, they are and Kenny if you’re watching this great song, man. Alright guys, that’s it for this episode. We’ll see you in the next one. Bye.

Rory Carruthers 51:34
Hey, thanks so much for joining us on the big picture business podcast this week. On the next episode, we speak with twin brothers and fitness business superstars Eric and Chris Martinez about using social media to fuel your business growth. We dive into topics such as the power of Instagram in communicating with your ideal audience. Chris and Eric’s online framework for getting leads and how to break past self limiting beliefs to become the leader in your market. Now even if you aren’t a fitness professional, there is a ton of business info to help you get the business and lifestyle that you deserve. And if you are a fitness professional, you are in for a real treat. Now remember, new episodes are released every Tuesday. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find us online at bpbpodcast.com and we have the full video episodes up on the BPB podcast YouTube channel. So check them out and we’ll see you in the next one.

 

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