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Albert Einstein, who died in 1955, earned $18 million last year.
Charles M. Schulz, whose PEANUTS characters live on in syndicated reprints, earned even more.
Ted Geisel, who will live forever in his timeless Cat in the Hat and Lorax and Sneetches and wacky machinery, earned more yet.
We all know you can’t take it with you, but you can keep earning it even when you’re not here to earn it. Well, not you, but the value of your intellectual property can carry on after you go gently into that good night.
Thus, if you’re the owner of any intellectual property at all, you need to bother protecting it. Whether you benefit from the protection personally or not, your heirs may very well benefit from it.
If the copyright in your work of authorship isn’t registered, register it. It costs $45 in the US, plus the time to fill in the Copyright Office’s #$% form if you do it yourself; it’s a bit more expensive to hire an attorney to do this for you, but you stand a better chance of successfully battling off any challenge that the Copyright Office might mount to your registration.
If the trademark that you’ve been using to designate your goods or services in commerce isn’t registered, register it. This is more involved than is copyright registration and you really should have an attorney do this for you.
While we pay lip service to the common-law rights of an intellectual property owner, registration of intellectual property rights provides significantly — SIGNFICANTLY — more and better protection.
IP can be passed on to another by will. You need to work with your attorney who handles your will and estate in concert with your attorney who handles intellectual property matters (and these are probably two different lawyers) to properly protect and pass on your IP. Your IP is a valuable part of your estate and needs to be treated every bit as decisively as does the dining room table or the computer or the … whatever.
After all, Einstein earned $18 million last year for his estate; why shouldn’t you do that after you’re gone?
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UPDATE: This kid is found and home, safe and sound, thanks to the Internet. Now for the nearly 800,000 others that go missing every year.
This is entirely off-topic.
However, the issue of missing and exploited children is important enough to make an off-topic post for.
Every year, thousands of children go missing. Some run away; others are abducted. Some of the abductors are the child’s non-custodial parent; some aren’t. Some kids just fall off the planet, and that is society’s shame.
I don’t know the person who posted the missing child alert except as a fellow group member on LinkedIn; he posted this message about his missing niece (of whom he has guardianship) in that group and asked that everyone get the word out. The link to his site is at the top of this posting.
The word is now out to everyone I know. Please either link to this page and send that to your network or, better, link to the page from which this info comes and send that out.
If you can provide any information about Jennifer, contact the Colorado Bureau of Investigations. Of course, if whoever has her crossed state lines with her, that puts it on federal time so the FBI would become involved.
Here’s a photo of the girl.
Join me in hoping for her safe return to her family.
