You’ve worked hard, investing countless hours writing that novel you always knew you had in you. You stayed up late at night re-designing that circuit that’s been failing OCAD so many times, you could actually taste the copper in your mouth. And you’ve been banging away at that electronic synth you hooked up to your PC last year, trying to tweak that verse or tune you’re ready to throw in the towel so many times. But it’s all over now. You’ve accomplished your dream – you finished that novel, song, completed that invention and you were doing all this while holding down your mundane day job and raising your kid as a single parent.
Congrats! But now what? Do you hand that manuscript or that software design over to some unscrupulous publisher or sneaky corporate type, who can just run off with your work and claim it as his own? Can you protect your work, from what amounts to nothing but abject theft of your labour of love? The short answer is yes. There are a number of systems that are available to you, none of which are mutually exclusive, some of which will be suitable for you. It all depends on how much you’re prepared to invest to protect your work, as some of these protective measures are costly. Some are practically free.
Here at Calleja & Associates, we believe that a hybrid strategy of informal and formal protective measures should be adopted to create the right balance to maintain a suitable level of protection whilst keeping costs moderate. Naturally, each case is examined on its own merits and a bespoke strategy developed in relation to a particular work.
So, if you think that you’ve developed a work of intellectual value that requires some level or other of protection, you may want to read the following articles on informal and formal protective measures to help you decide what suits you best. These articles, in and of themselves, shall not be sufficient of course to develop the strategy you may need. They will help you get a better grasp of what may suit you better, though ultimately we think that you’d need to give us a call for a proper discussion at our offices.
