Navigating Brand Protection in the Digital Age

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. So hello everybody, we are back and we are continuing our conversation about all things, not all things, but a lot of things technical, whether it's from an entrepreneurial side or developer side. In this episode, we're going to get into CYA, basically, what do you do to protect your brand but also to avoid stepping on other people that are protecting their brand. But before we get into this, I'm Rob, I am a founder of Developer Noor, Building Better Developers, also founder of RB Consulting. On the other side of the internet is Michael. Go ahead and introduce yourself. Hey everyone, I'm Michael Milosz. I'm also a co-founder of Developer Noor and I'm a founder of Envision QA. And now what started us into this conversation is that I had references that could be, though tongue in cheek, could have been seen as us saying that we are associated with a very big organization. It's one that has big ears and a little tail and some stuff. I think he has a tail. I don't even know if he has a tail. But there are organizations that are well known to come after, we'll say come after people that use their brands or their materials or their signage or anything like that in a way that is not accepted. And there are the big names that everybody knows would be Disney, would be Apple, would be Microsoft. IBM, Oracle, Pepsi, Coke, these people, Nike, they have built a brand. And all of those names that I mentioned, you know them. You know who they are. You know exactly what they are. Like if I say Nike, probably you just had a vision of the swoosh. And Apple, that little bite out of an apple. Disney, I don't know who you are, but it's probably the castle, Cinderella's Castle there. These are iconic things and it's because they built a brand and there is something behind that. So if you buy something from Nike, you expect a certain quality, you expect a certain style. And they want their customers to expect that and to want that and to associate that with them. So you know, you're not going to get crappy knockoffs or something like that. And so while some people I think see it as a, you know, sick, you know, being evil and sicking people on those that would infringe upon your rights, there's actually a lot of value in building your brand and a lot of smarts in protecting your brand. So, is one, making sure that you are doing the right things to protect your brand, just the basic things that you can. You can get very complex. We've had, I don't want to go back into, we had a podcast episode a while back. We talked to a lawyer about specifically about the varying ways between copyrights and patents and all of those things. We got into that. Go back, check it out. There'll be links in the show notes. Michael make sure you put those links in the show notes. So we'll talk a little bit about that. I don't want to get too far because he does a better job because he actually is a lawyer. I also want to talk about making sure that you don't step on other people's toes. Now one of the things that happens a lot, and I see this including my own children, is people will put stuff out on YouTube and they will get it pulled down because they have music in the background that is not their music. It is not within the fair use guidelines or they will have an image or there's a lot of stuff like that that they will have that it will cause you to be pulled down and you'll get a takedown notice, which includes them, I think just automatically taking you down and you have to go prove that you have, you know, you've got licensed material or something along those lines. Now I will say that, what is it, YouTube, I have to, when I have used material that is trademark, that is copyright material, and if you notice, we used to have in a lot of our videos, there was like a musical introduction to develop an oar that is very different than it is these days. We had a version one and we had licensed the music. It was licensed through the tools that we use and stuff like that. The problem was that I had to actually, every time I posted something out on YouTube, it would get flagged as this is licensed and I would have to go in or a little comment to basically say, hey, we license it through this way, this is how it is. They didn't allow me to just do a blanket to say that every time we use that song, that section of music, that it's kosher, we're good. I just got tired of it. I said, all right, after 50 or 100 times of doing it, I said, forget it. I am not going to do this. We're just going to change to something that is in the public domain. So now we have music that we don't get flagged for. So don't sit there and use whatever your favorite song is to have your intro to your podcast or to your background music. I don't want, we don't need like house music sitting there in the background while you're talking on YouTube. Don't do it because it's going to get it pulled down because those people spent time and there is licensing related to all that stuff. Unless you want to go license that, then go for it by all means. But feel free to, before you get into that, go to go look for any big radio show in particular. One that always comes to mind because it was just back and forth over the years would be the Rush Limbaugh show that for years they have something that's owned by Chrissy Hines of the Pretenders is his bumper music that he comes into. You don't hear, I don't think you ever hear, yeah, you don't think you hear her lyrics at all. You wouldn't know it's her unless you know that song. But if you've heard that song, you know that that's the Pretenders. And actually, if you want to look up people that step on stuff all the time is look at hip hop and rap and house music where they remix varying drumbeats and riffs and stuff like that. And there is a certain amount they can steal that's essentially in the fair usage. But then they end up like sometimes they have a tire song, they get sued because it sounds too much like the song. Like if I think one of the classic ones is look up Vanilla Ice and Queen because he's or I'm sorry, it's David Bowie, I think owned it. Is his big song was also under pressure was the like the bass line that he stole from them. And they ended up with a lawsuit around all of that. And there's plenty of others like that. But watch out what you're doing before you know, when you're going to put your stuff together, don't just be like, oh, this is my favorite song. I'm going to play it because you're probably going to end up in a takedown notice. And now, once again, I've spoken way too long. So I'm going to pass it over to Michael so I can take a breath and he can contribute. Yeah, Rob. So. I have a question for you in a moment, but one of the things that's interesting and we've run into this even with developer as you're building your presence on the Web, regardless of what content you use, be conscious of where you get it. Make sure you keep a record of where you get it, because you never know when the trolls of the Internet are going to look for something and say, hey, we think you stole that. We're going to hit you with some lawsuit to try and make you pay money for something that you may legitimately own. The other thing. I want to mention, so we've kind of talked about copyright a little bit now you've thrown out fair use or out of copyright. Can you clarify that a little bit for listeners if they don't understand what that is? I am not a lawyer, so I am not going to get so check, check with a lawyer. Don't just like look it up on Wikipedia, because I could do that right now. But there is depending on there are a lot of licenses out there. There is Creative Commons. There is there is the GPL, the Gnu's public license. There's a lot of licenses that you will find depending on whether you're dealing with images, whether you're dealing with music, whether you're dealing with source code or written content. If you get into the music world, then there are there are entire businesses that are based on getting people paid for the music that they wrote. And that's a BMI and ASCAP and those guys are out there. Then that's what they do. They do good work. I've worked with them in the past. That's pretty cool. It's awesome. That's it's it's a really interesting industry. There is also those that are related to the recording, the video movie industry. Most of those you're going to have, you know, they're going to be names that are well known names. And then you have people now on the image side. People are going because you have all of these this AI image kind of stuff out there is that you can go do searches on the web for images like this image or this image and you can do image searches. And if somebody's got that as a background on their website or they've got it as a, you know, just a general image on their web, then they can say, hey, that's I don't know that I've got a record of you owning that. And then it's basically like, hey, you don't own that. Where's my, you know, how did I get paid? And so it's basically you need to have like a receipt as Michael said, is make sure you have a list of like, hey, where, where did I get this? And depending on what you're using, what service you're using, they may not, they may disappear, so make sure you've got somewhere that I bought it off of, you know, Bob's images 10 years ago so they can always chase it back down to there, but at least say, Hey, I, I spent money and paid it to them so you can go chase down Bob and his images and he needs to pay you or something along those lines. And I don't know the legality of that. I don't know who's actually going to be responsible in those cases, but be careful when in doubt, the more you can build your own stuff, the better create your own. Everything. If you can do background images that are your own photos, if you can, you know, all of that kind of stuff, just do it all yourself. Then you're going to be safe. If you don't have the ability to do that, then go off of well-known like I stock or Adobe stock images, or some of those that are the big places, dreamstime, all of those that have been around for a while and they're, they're not going to go away or if they do, you'll at least be able to say, Hey, I bought it through these guys. Here's the, here's the ID so you can go track it back. Um, don't get it. Like if you're just grabbing stuff off of free image sites and stuff like that, then you, you may be running into trouble. Yeah. But if you're doing that, make sure you keep a record of, so one of the things I found, even with the freemium sites or the public domain sites is make sure you basically you have to treat it like resource material. So you have to, uh, register or kind of record when you got it, where do you got it, uh, make sure you saved the file in its original content, file name, all that, because usually it has an ID in it that will protect you. Yes, you can go make changes to that, but as long as you can reference back to that and say, Hey, I got it from here. Usually you're fine. Uh, other things are what's wonderful about this country is over a certain amount of time, things roll into what is called the public domain. And if things are in the public domain, we can pretty much do anything we want with those. Uh, for instance, you know, if you are a house of mouse person is, you know, Winnie the Pooh went in the public domain, uh, the steamboat Mickey went into the public domain and now all of a sudden we have this horror verse of, uh, Disney characters or house of mouse characters that are being recreated by other people that don't own the license to them, but they don't have to, because they're now in the public domain, they're out of copyright protection, but just be careful with anything that you create. Be conscious because if you're building something that you want to protect, be mindful of other people's content. You know, don't go rip someone else's content off if you don't want your stuff ripped off. Uh, I mean, it's kind of, you know, uh, what's the, I'm forgetting the, the golden rule or. Yeah. Do unto them as you would like them to do unto you. Exactly. Thank you. Um, so as, as you're building this stuff out, as you're building your content, as you're building your brand, be mindful of other brands. Now, if you do happen to infringe on someone, talk to them, you know, yes, you might get a takedown notice if you're going after Nintendo or Disney or one of the other players, if you infringe upon them, figure out how to get away from that as quickly as possible. But if you run across a smaller business that you've never heard of that hits you with some talk to them, don't just, you know, yes, take your stuff down, be mindful of that, but also reach out to them, say, Hey, what did I do wrong? How, you know, can I work with you to figure out a way to move forward and still keep the content out there? So there's conversations that can be had when you're not dealing with these big, monstrous organizations, but sometimes you do run a foul and you just have to be cautious of that and be mindful of the law. And I think you mentioned having references and using it as your resources kind of thing. I think we all, for the most part, we've been raised because we went through, had to write papers and, you know, as a youth and we had to have bibliographies and we had to use sources and stuff like that. So if you have a quote, you have to have a reference, you have that in your footnotes or in your, your bibliography. That's for text. You need to essentially do, or it is very helpful to do that with your images and video and audio. And if you look a good example, if you look at sports videos that they put it like highlight reels that they'll do, particularly if you're watching like college football, basketball, stuff like that, you'll get, you know, between periods, they'll have this little, they'll have some background music and they'll have all the scenes, you know, the big scenes of the big plays that just happened. And they almost always will have down in the bottom there, they'll be like, this is, you know, you know, cool tunes by Michael Mulash or whatever it is so that they are properly crediting who did it. And I'm sure that that's part of what the deal is. They say, Hey, you can use my music as long as you put it there. And, you know, or, you know, Monday night football, as long as I'm part of the, you know, the introduction video or whatever it happens to be. And so there are ways to work that, but just be conscious of that because you're building stuff that you wouldn't want somebody to steal and realize that other people are going to do that or doing the same thing. They're in the same boat. They want to get proper credit for what they do. Understand if you're going to put content out, get an idea of what the varying levels of, of licenses are that are available, that are easily available, that you can easily adopt. We're going to have to cut this out. Can you hear that? Oh, good. Because it's like some storm alert coming on. Good. You don't have to cut it out. There we go. Um, so be cautious and be, go into it with like, just realize that this is something that you do need to be aware of. And like I said, you can check out our, our prior podcast and you can also go talk to him and talk to him or your favorite lawyer about protecting yourself. You had something you were going to say there, Michael. Yeah. So we've talked about being cautious and conscious about the content that you produce. Now in the same token, like Rob said, go back and listen to the other, uh, interview conversation that, uh, we had about legalities and things like that. But make sure that if you're putting something out and you're building your brand, make sure to protect that. If you have like a logo or something like the check mark, go get a trademark. If you have copyrighted material, get it copyrighted. You know, go look at the things that you need to do to protect your intellectual rights for the material. If you're going to go big, if you're just going out and throwing stuff up, you know, willy nilly, just, Hey, I just kind of want to throw stuff out there. That's fine. You don't necessarily have to go that far, but be conscious of other people's material and don't rip them off. I think that's a perfect play for us to wrap up this episode. Don't rip us off. Actually, you could, you could do whatever you want. Basically for, from our point of view is reach out to us. If you have any questions, you want to use any of our stuff. If you want to use it, if you have any questions about the code that we've put out there or anything like that, definitely shoot us an email because we're, we're pretty easy going with a lot of that kind of stuff. Um, and you know, we'll just, you know, usually it's just like give credit where credits do, if there's something that we saw, that's really cool, just throw it out there or put a little link that says, Hey, we got this off the developer site. And like most people, that's what they want. It's just say, Hey, use my stuff, but just make sure that I get credited so that when somebody uses it, that they bring it back and then be careful that you don't want somebody to use your stuff. That they start with that. Like Michael referred to, they start with that. Then they start doing their own thing and end up essentially corrupting it. And now it gets blown back on you that, Oh, by the way, you know, you built this really crappy thing. You're like, no, no, no, no, that was not me. So there are licenses around that too. They say, Hey, you can use it, but you cannot extend it or you cannot go back and edit certain pieces of it. Be aware. And that's going to help you out quite a bit. Also be aware that we are not done with this season. So we're going to come back. We're going to continue working through some of the issues that we've seen. Some of the questions that we've had and hopefully some questions from you. Feel free to shoot us one at info at develop a newer.com. Check us out on our site at developer.com. You can enter the form there and contact us that way. You can catch us on Facebook, uh, go out there on YouTube and check out the developer channel. You'll find this and lots and lots and lots of other videos that, um, and just search through there. Cause I'm sure you'll find something useful depending on what language and what problem you're trying to solve. Cause we do solve a lot of problems across the over a thousands of, I think we're probably close to 1500 different posts and, and pieces of content that we've put out over the years. So that being said, we're going to wrap this one up. We will be there next time. Take care of yourselves, go out there and become better developers. And as always have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you. Thank you for listening to building better developers, the developer nor podcast. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success.