You know I like to say that “IP is everywhere.” I mean this in the legal sense. It’s on your website, in your LinkedIn posts and newsletters, part of client deliverables, the essence of the work you and your employees do.

For fellow quick starts like me, you know where else it is. In the physical sense—everywhere.

The ideas come fast and furiously. In the middle of night. While driving and listening to a podcast. After a meet and greet call.

How many times have you heard the refrain: "Work Smarter, Not Harder." Sign me up, right? 🙋🏽‍♀️

But what does this really mean?

I know what I think it means—which I will share shortly—but I realized that I had never actually read a definition. So here’s what Sir Google had to say.

There is the productivity definition from the engineer credited with coining the term, meaning “a work simplification program to increase productivity using less effort.”

An unexpected overwhelm of work has me writing this at 10pm.

So I figured that while we are on the topic of the “who, what, and why” of copyrights, I am re-publishing (cheat #1) an intellectual property ownership cheat sheet (cheat #2) for those of you who are newer to my work, or who just appreciate a good cheat sheet!

Yes, I’m going to the mat.

Making understandable the distinction between products and intellectual property is the hill I will die on.

Products and IP are not the same thing. IP does not equal passive income. You can have IP without products. You can use IP without owning it.

A formal but tremendously illustrative definition:

Thinking about turning your expertise into a licensing program, but concerned that it isn’t a fit for your highly customized, non-recurring professional services? If so, you are correct. The type of licensing program I’ve been writing and speaking about isn’t the right fit for your business.

If I recall correctly, I had not yet summarized one of my podcast episodes in this newsletter. But I recently got a crash course in a (rapidly growing) corner of intellectual property law that was previously a complete and utter mystery to me: Web 3.0.

It appears that the 12th time is the charm. 😅

In case you haven’t heard, Eli Manning has a new title: Team Owner. It took this announcement to finally get me thinking about the parallels between these athletes and our expertise-based businesses.

When you spend every day immersed in a topic, it is easy to assume that key concepts are widely understood. In the course of proselytizing about the importance of turning your expertise into intellectual property, I have come to realize that what constitutes intellectual property, also known as IP, is still a bit of a headscratcher for many people.

I hesitated to even write about website terms and conditions. I promise that all TBIP content is a no legalese zone. Also, I’ve considered them minor issues to the expertise-based business. I am pretty militant about saying that I don’t have an “online business” (I’ll unpack that in another post.)