Intellectual Property

There are many different ways of making a living.  There are those who go to work each day, use their muscles to lift things, move things, dig things or scan things across a bar code scanner.  They get paid an acceptable wage to do this stuff. If it was not acceptable, then someone else would be doing it. Others go into an office each day. They often sit at desks typing on computer keyboards.  They’re usually given instructions as to what they should accomplish and generally speaking, they follow them and get paid for doing this.  If they don’t follow the instructions carefully enough, they probably don’t last long sitting at that particular desk, then they have to go out and find another one. If this keeps happening, then they might end up having to use their muscles to earn a living.

I make my living by using my brain.  I’m fortunate to have the kind of brain that is capable of earning a living. I could work for someone else and still use my brain, but instead, I choose to pluck words out of thin air, put them in some sort of order that is pleasing to me and consign them to pages, either real or virtual, for posterity.  I also come up with ideas that no-one has thought of in quite the same way as I have.  For example, when my former business partner (who shall remain nameless because she thoroughly deserves ignominy) wanted to video one of her training sessions and sell it to clients,  I thought about it and came up with a far better idea.

Why don’t we make a movie out of the Sales Training books I had written? I know, making movies out of books was not an original idea, but making a series of sales training videos and developing workbooks to make the videos interactive was very original.  That’s called intellectual property. When you devise something that is original, that came straight from your brain, you have the rights to that original something.  Even if you based your idea on something that already existed.  Sales training existed before I came up with my idea.  Videos existed too. So did Sales Training videos.  What didn’t exist before I came up with the idea was the methodology of making them work interactively in a unique way. My way. 

Thinking about unique things is all well and good but as long as those things stay only in your mind, you own only your own thoughts. You actually have to do something with the unique thing before it’s of any value. You have to make something of it and that’s exactly what I did. I wrote scripts because my ignominiously unnamed business partner wasn’t clever enough to speak and look at the camera at the same time.  I learned how to film and edit so that I could create the videos.  I designed workbooks to make it easy for trainees to interact with the videos.  I wrote every word of those workbooks.  Then when I was done, I wrote every piece of promotional material we needed to take the product to market.  That is intellectual property.

The interesting thing about intellectual property is how much or how little people value it. The video sales training programme I created generated over $1.5million in 18 months, so it was obviously worth something.  When things were going well and it looked like I would be creating even more unique video sales training programmes, then I got paid, but at some stage, things stopped going quite so smoothly.  The unnamed ignominious business partner started believing the exultant and exuberant press releases I wrote about her.  She forgot it was all hyperbole and started believing that she was indeed the amazing, talented guru of sales I made her out to be. In reality, she was just a divorced suburban housewife who had experience in sales-training, all learned by rote from other people.  Her primary claim to fame was her innate ability to trail along on the coat-tails of others until she had sucked them dry, discarding them once they had outlived their usefulness.  She had left a trail of ill-used mentors and benefactors behind her, I was just the last in a long succession.

Suddenly, the intellectual property is not worth so much anymore.  Funny how that happens when your business partner systematically dismantles your business so they can steal your ideas and use them to start up under a new name.  Once the formula has been developed and applied and it works, what do you need the creator for?  Why keep paying for intellectual property?  Because, moral obligations aside, without that creative spark, that flash of insight that caused something to be created where nothing existed before, the ignominious, cheating, thieving, erstwhile business partners of the world would have nothing at all.  They could try using their own imagination to create something of value that they could earn a living from, if they’re lucky enough or practiced enough to have the type of brain that comes up with ideas that are worth something. Of course, if they were capable of that, they would have done it themselves and if they had done it, they’d want to protect their brilliant idea so that some other thieving cheat didn’t come along and steal it out from under them.