As I am preparing to create my business plan for my
production company, I am seeking professional legal counsel. I admit I am a
little nervous!! I want to have enough money to pay for the legal counsel and I
want to do things right for the protection of my work. Gratefully, one of my
sisters reminded me of an organization that can help me feel secure. The Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts,
provides legal counsel to low-income artists and non-profit arts and cultural
organizations, which cannot afford standard legal fees. As of 1969, VLA is the
first arts-related legal aid organization and is now the model to similar
organizations around the world.
I visited their office this week and got some tips
from their Senior Staff Attorney, Eric Tam. Eric has been serving at VLA since
September 2011. As noted in Eric’s bio, he graduated summa cum laude from
McMaster University with a combined honors degree from the Arts and Science
Program and the Department of Philosophy, and earned a Master’s degree studying
political theory at Yale University prior to obtaining his Juris Doctor from
Yale Law School in 2007. Eric has worked with emerging artists who cannot pay
the standard fees. His professional advice to qualifying clients has touched areas
of copyright, trademark, defamation, small scale licensing, contracts for production,
artist management and more. I asked Eric to give me the top 3 tips for new
artists dealing with copyright and trademark issues. Here they are:
1) Although you obtain a
copyright on any original work that you create in fixed form—such as an
electronic file created by a word processing program or a song recorded on
tape—you should strongly consider registering your copyright in any work that
may have value with the U.S. Copyright Office. Registration of your copyright
(assuming it was created in the U.S.) is necessary for enforcing it in court,
and it provides evidence of your ownership of the work, as well as other legal
advantages. You can conveniently register your copyright online, for $35 per
work, via the Copyright Office’s website.
2) Copyright generally only
protects expression, rather than ideas. For example, your copyright would
enable you to keep someone from publishing or copying significant parts of your
novel or film script without your permission, or recording a cover of your song
without compensating you. However, your copyright generally would not enable
you to keep someone else from writing a novel or script with a similar plotline
or characters (but different dialogue), nor would your copyright give you the
power to prevent someone else from publishing or recording a song on the same
theme or that used a similar mix of instruments (but different lyrics and
composition). If you think you have a highly valuable artistic idea, your main
option for protecting the idea would be to try to obtain non-disclosure/non-competition-type
agreements from anyone with whom you share your idea. (Unfortunately, doing so
may be difficult for newer artists who want to work with more established
businesses and individuals, because new artists often lack the power to
negotiate the terms of collaboration.)
3) Get important agreements and
promises in writing and be careful to pay attention to anything you sign. Make
sure everything is clear to you in a contract before you sign it. If you are
trying to write your own contract, you may be able to find examples online that
can give you an idea of your options or provide you with a starting point. But if
the contract might have any important consequences for you, you should
definitely consult with a lawyer to look it over before finalizing it.
I have personally made business mistakes in my past
due to poor knowledge and lack of personal legal counsel. I am convinced that
legal counsel will be clearly mapped out in various areas of my business plan.
My legal counsel will help set the standard of how I conduct all agreements for
my music business going forward. This will definitely help me not make the same
mistakes again.
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