108: How to Legally Protect Your Online Course From Copycats
Want to know how to protect your online course from copycats? Tune into this episode where I'm chatting with Amy Nesheim, Lawyer for Entrepreneurs and Founder of Artful Contracts.
Amy will walk us through how to protect our intellectual property like our online course from copycats, the difference between a copyright and trademark, the importance of having an LLC for your online business and much more.
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Transcript:
And today, my special guest is Amy Neisham. Amy is a corporate lawyer turned online entrepreneur and founder of artful contracts. She started artful contracts because she believes that all business owners, no matter the size of the business or how successful, should have access to high quality legal resources without going into debt over massive legal fees. She is on a mission to make the legal aspects.
Of online business accessible to everyone so entrepreneurs can grow their businesses faster and with more confidence. Amy, thank you so much for joining me. I am super excited to jump into this topic with you today.
Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here.
Yeah, and what we're going to be talking about is how to legally protect your online course. And I know that a lot of the online course creators and entrepreneurs who are listening to this podcast episode, we all, and I've been here too, right? We all have fears that somebody is going to copy our course name or our course content and we won't be able to do.
Anything about it and has actually happened to me. So I know, I know how this feels. So can you walk us through what we can do to protect these digital assets in our company?
Yes, this is such an important topic that I get questions about all the time. So the first thing to know is that we are talking about intellectual property. So as a creator you are creating things. As a course creator you are producing things out of your brain and they are your brainchild. You love them. You want to protect them, right? So just by the fact of having created it and having it put down on paper or you know, digital paper as it were, by recording something.
You are the owner of it and you have legal rights to protect it. So there's two categories that we're talking about here, and that is copyright and trademark. And I'm sure you've heard those words before, but you might not know what they mean or the difference. So copyrights protect the creative works, things that you create of your imagination and then put into a fixed format like videos and workbooks and your courses and anything you write that goes along with it blog content.
Social media content, all of that. Your content is copyrighted and just by creating it, you automatically have copyright protections in it. Now, the other side of it is your course name, your business name. All of your branding is protected by trademarks. So that's the difference. Copyrights protect your content, trademarks protect your branding. And again, you also have automatic trademark protections in your course name and your business name, just by the fact.
Of using it in. You know, in your market by selling things you automatically have some rights. But of course, what do you, what does that even mean? What do you do with it and how does that actually help you?
For your copyrights to protect your courses and your products, your content, all of that, you. And there's a few actions that you can take, and the first one is to just put the copyright symbol on all your stuff, which is not legally required to protect your stuff, but it helps other people know and like puts everyone else on. Notice that you are the one who owns that and you're not giving everyone permission just by publishing it to use it themselves, right?
So first up, let everyone else know that you own your stuff by using the copyright symbol. Second step is, if you do get into that situation, you can write a letter. And I know that sounds super basic, but you write a letter just, again, it's telling that other person that you have rights and that you're going to enforce them if they don't do what you say, which is take down your content. So you write a letter. And then the second step would be, if that doesn't work, have a lawyer write a letter. And there's also ways that you can.
Let the domain host know, or let Google know that someone else has copied your stuff and they'll take it down for you. And that's called a DMCA takedown notice. So, Dustin, I know I just said a lot of things, so do you. Did that bring up any questions for you?
No, that's that is great information. And as you were going through here, I always like to refresh my memory and making sure that I'm doing everything I'm supposed to be doing too in my business. So from what I understood from what you were saying, so for copywriting.
Would be like putting that copyright symbol on any workbooks or Cheat Sheets or any anything that we've created in our course. And this will apply to our website too, right? Any blog content and and so on and so forth. And then if we found somebody who's actually copied that content is sending that letter, and I'm sure you have a template for us. And then the second step would be having a lawyer sending a letter, and then we can also contact.
The domain host to have that taken down, so that's the copyright. What about the trademark? Can we go into that process a little bit?
Yes. So for trademarks, I do recommend that if you are serious about your business, serious about building your brand and you want to have a national brand with recognition across state lines, which as online course creators, online business owners, of course we want that because our market is not limited to our.
Local area, right? Then the way that you the best way to protect your branding is to actually register a trademark with the US Patent and Trademark Office. And this is a long process. I do recommend that you get help from a lawyer who actually knows the process, because it is complicated and it has some nuances that can trip you up if you don't know what you're doing. So get some guidance on it. But that's the best way to protect your branding.
Because then you have ownership of your brand in the in your market, in the area that you sell things. So in the online course space, you have ownership of that name and of your logo. If you decide to register your logo as well at across the US and not just in your local geographic area, so with copyright protection, it's across the US automatically you have some protection there, but with trademarks, the automatic protection is.
Fairly limited because the law is stuck back in the days of local pizza shops and local businesses, brick and mortar where people would, you know, people would recognize a business based and go to a business based off of the local area and not this online national market that we have now. So there is a bit of a lag in the protections in that you do need to get it registered in order to have that national protection.
So there's some great information. And Amy, would that apply to our business name plus any name that we're using for any of the courses that we have?
Yes. So it's any branding item and what trademarks are the definition is basically the the thing that people use to associate your goods with the business itself. So the thing that ties together the fact that you're selling something that identifies the source of the thing that you're selling.
So the source of the thing that you're selling is anything, is any branding item basically. So that can be your business name because that identifies the source of all your goods. It could be your course name because that identifies the source of the course content, right. And it could be your logo. So bank brands, to give you an idea, is like the Nike Swoosh logo that we all think of, we know automatically we associate that with Nike. That is a trademark, just the Swoosh itself.
The word Nike is also a trademark because it identifies the business, but then you also can have trademarks that are sub product lines.
And and really, it can, it can go a lot beyond that. Like some hotels have trademarked their signature scent that is sprayed in the lobby. So you walk into a lobby, you smell it, and it's the, it makes you think of that brand. It's that brand association that makes it a trademarkable thing. So I don't know, I find that interesting. It's probably not super relevant for a course creator, but it's to give you an idea. It's any branding item you can trademark.