 Let me throw my review at you. That's a lousy way to do it. Hi, my name is Ryan Kitty. I am a business and e-commerce attorney. I represent clients of all sizes, from freelancers and solopreneurs to enterprises. I've been practicing for eight years solely in the state of Florida. And I'm here today to talk to you about taking the FUD out of your online business. For those of you that don't know, that's the fear, uncertainty, and doubt. And we're going to be focusing primarily on limiting your legal liability. It should come as no surprise that this attorney comes with a disclaimer. That while I am an attorney, I'm not necessarily your attorney, though I do present some of you. So the presentation today is for informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for actually speaking with an attorney that has the opportunity to review your specific facts and circumstances. So when we look at limiting legal liability, we're looking to do that for three major reasons. The first of which is compliance. Obviously, complying with the law can save you a lot of money upfront rather than having to have your website shut down, having to deal with fines, having to pay for costly litigation. You do not want to have to go to court for any reason. So we're here today to educate you about what laws you should be considering and complying with so you don't have to go down that road. Also credibility. Having things like privacy policy in terms of use on your website. First of all, established credibility with your end user and your clients. They know that you're a sophisticated entrepreneur, but also things that like contracts. You're not going to send a legal zoom contract to an enterprise level client. They're going to know right off the bat that you're ill-equipped to handle the level of project that they're looking to handle. When I say enterprise, if you're not familiar, those are the larger companies when you think Netflix. You don't want to send them a legal zoom contract. And similarly, you don't want to send a mom and pop company a small side project, a 25 page monstrosity of a master service agreement because they're going to be terrified and you're going to lose business. So having proper contracts in place is also a way of establishing credibility with people you work with. And lastly, deterrence. Obviously, if you have your legal contracts in place, your privacy policy, your terms of use, you're going to be reducing your exposure to legal liability because you have clear agreements, clear understandings, and they're far less likely to be disputes. And you've created leverage for yourself because you have everything in writing to actually negotiate a settlement without actually having to go to court, which again, if we learn nothing else, we do not want to go to court. It's extremely expensive. So what we're going to cover today for ways to limit legal liability, forming the company, the privacy policy, the terms of use, trademark, and copyright. I'm going to ask if there's questions in between the segments. So feel free to let me know if there's something that you'd like to discuss in more detail. I want to make sure that the people in this room are getting their questions answered. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on corporate formation because I have a feeling a lot of you have probably already gone through the process in the state of Florida, but part of what I want to do is help you guys save money. There's certain things that you need to speak to an attorney for, and there's certain things that you can do yourself and save yourself money. With SunBiz.org, the website at the top is where you go with the Division of Corporations in the state of Florida to form your business entity. The three most popular forms of business are the Limited Liability Company, Corporation, an S-Corp, and a C-Corp. The Limited Liability Company is the preferred method for small businesses because it's the least formal process. You're not dealing with shareholders, boards of directors, which you think of when you think of a more formal corporation. The difference between the S-Corp and the C-Corp, the C-Corp is what you typically think of when you think of a Fortune 500 company with the board of directors, the multiple shares, and classes, and the drawback to that, in addition to being more formal and having more stringent reporting requirements, is the fact that you're taxed twice, you're taxed at a corporate level and at a personal or individual level, so on your income and also on your corporate income. So unless you're dealing with multiple shareholders and classes of stock and things, that's probably not going to be the way you wanna go. So you would choose, if you were going to go the S-Corp route, you would choose the corporation through some biz.org, and then you would make a tax election through the IRS for the S-Corp, which you can choose how you wanna be treated for tax purposes. And this is something that you're gonna wanna talk to your accountants with as well, because there's other considerations for how and why you want to structure your business. If you have individual debts, such as child support or alimony, you're differentiating your individual debt from your business debt, so you're gonna wanna, number one, talk about what's best for your business, number two, talk about what is best for you personally. Again, when we're talking about legal liability, I just wanna make sure that you understand you're differentiating between personal and business for something like if you're in a car accident. If you, God forbid, accidentally rear-end someone, having a corporate structure and following the rules and responsibilities that you need to do to maintain that corporate structure means that the person will only be able to come after you as an individual and not go after your business assets. So it's a small investment. Again, you can do this online in less than five minutes. What you would actually wanna pay for the consultation is making sure that you're selecting the right entity, but it's something that you guys can do quick and easy for yourself. Registered agents, so in the state of Florida, we have a lot of transparency, which is both good and bad. If you wanna look up somebody online and find out who's registered them or whatever, you can find out all of their addresses, which comes into, if you're a freelancer, I myself, I work from home. I don't necessarily want my home address advertised versus especially with an attorney. Some people don't like attorneys, it's weird. I don't want them to be able to find me at home. So get a corporate mailbox, so you're not receiving mail and it's not a matter of public knowledge where you live, but also registered agents. So this can be anybody, it can be your lawyer, it can be your accountant, and some even mailbox services will offer to register agent service. This is basically the person that you designate or appoint to receive mail or legal service on your behalf during business hours. So if you are a freelancer or you work from home, someone has to be able to receive, if you were summits or subpoena or something like that. These are typically services that they may charge for. Some attorneys included if they handle your incorporation, just ask and see what's included, but again, that's a way to not have your personal home information online through submit.org. EIN number, just a pro tip. Again, saving you guys money, you're welcome. So through the IRS, you can get your EIN number. That's the electronic identification number that you're gonna need in order to open a bank account under your business name. So a lot of people will charge money for this service, but yes, go ahead. Is it easy to switch from one to the other through LFC to search through S-Corp or through S-Corp through search channels? I believe you're allowed to do it one time to change between the two of them, but it's a relatively easy process. Again, it's a form through submit.org and it can all be done online. And it's a pretty self-explanatory. Like I said, I mean, what you're really, what you're gonna wanna hire an attorney for is if you have a partner and you need a shareholder agreement, you need an operating agreement. When you're getting more specific with how your business is structured and you're bringing more people into it, you're absolutely gonna wanna document what documents in place, but for the actual filing itself, you'll see its name, address, registered agent, officers and things like that. So once you know what kind of organization you wanna form, it's relatively easy. Yeah. It says in the mid-liability, but is there really, are you somewhat protected or like how does that, how protected are you, I guess? So the reason that it's limited liability is they're looking at the amount of investments, so your share of the debt and liability is commensurate with your, what you're putting into the company. But yes, you have to maintain certain standards, so there's a lot that goes into it, but they have piercing the corporate fail is what the legal standard for, if I have a company and you wanna sue me, I ran into you and you wanna sue my company, they look for have I maintained my annual records, have I filed my minutes, am I actually treating this business as a business or am I running it personally, running my finances through it? As long as I'm maintaining the accounting and the actual business structure, then yes, it absolutely limits your liability. It does exactly what it says it will do. So privacy policies. Privacy policies are an interesting thing to talk about because nobody knows that they're legally required to have them. So a best practice in the US, privacy law is not federal, meaning all states have different rules and regulations for what is that one rule, and the best practice is obviously to adhere to the most stringent law on the land. If you adhere to the most stringent, then you never have to worry because you're conforming. That law in the US is almost always California. When we look at intellectual property rights, anything to do with computer technology, obviously we have Silicon Valley, so we're conforming with California. And California has Calapa. And Calapa states, if you collect any personally identifiable information that you're legally required to have a privacy policy, well what's personally identifiable information? It's somebody's first name or last name or telephone number or email address. It's not all of those things, it's any one of those things. So even if you're just running a blog and you ask for an email address for a newsletter, you're legally required to have a privacy policy. If you have a contact form, I mean I've talked to attorneys, I've talked to enterprise level businesses, they're like, well I'm not collecting personally identifiable information and I just have a contact form. Yes, you do. And you're collecting personally identifiable information. The great news is having a privacy policy is not an expensive process. This is not something that's going to cost you thousands of dollars. You're being proactive against establishing that credibility with your clients to tell them what data you're collecting, how you're treating it, whether you're using cookies, behavioral analytics. In 2014, Cal Opa also added that you have to provide notice of whether you honor, do not track. So in web browsers like Google, you can go in there and turn off the cookies mechanism. So you're legally required to state whether you honor the do not track signals or not. And when they ask that question, they're also asking if your plugins or your third party processes are as well. So for best practice pro tip, just say you don't honor them. You're not required to honor them. If you're not sure and somebody else could, don't be wrong. Aaron was that a caution on that. Can I add to that real quick? Yes, absolutely. So you can't pay me gateways which we're going to talk about later today. You can't set up an account with like authorize.net if your website doesn't have a public privacy policy at the bottom of the website. Yeah, so Amazon and eBay, a lot of the third party marketplaces and things require, again, they're reducing their liability by requiring you to have one. You'll see that the mobile apps are a part of this as well. Something that I run into and a favorite question is, yeah, I know you're telling me that I have to adhere to the law, but they're not really enforcing that. Why do I need to do that? Yeah, so they enforce that arbitrarily. State of California kind of uses it as a fundraiser. The last time that they had a major, the last time that they had a major bout was 2012 and they sent out a couple of thousands of notices to mobile app developers to let them know that they were finding them. They had 30 days to cure and if they didn't, it would be $2,500 for every download of the app. So you have to have a privacy policy if you have an app and you're collecting personally identifiable information. Yes, sir. Just a quick question on that. What's sufficient notice of the website? Is there something in the quarter? Is it a separate page or a private cell? Yeah, great question. The Calapa requirement is that it's on the homepage. It contains the word privacy. So, typically if you have it in your footer, oh, and it's first page contains the word privacy or a hyperlink on the first available page that is practicable. Put it on the homepage. Like it's in the footer. It's common practice. Everyone does it. You're not gonna look odd or scare people away by having it there. So there's no reason not to. Is there some verbiage that's copy-paste verbiage to write or is it too simple as you collect name, email phone, be aware of the statement, database. So a lot of the verbiage is similar and you're gonna see the same thing over and over again. There's a set list of things that you have to include. So you have to say what data you're collecting, how you're using it, if you're storing it, how long you're storing it, are you using a third party payment processor, things like that. But there are also specifics involved with how your site is specifically treating the information. So some things are kind of boilerplate and the same thing over and over again, but when you're dealing with, like if you were gonna sell the service to your end user or tell them this is something that you need to consider, you have to go through their process and it's gonna get even more, wait till we get to GDPR because it's gonna get even more fun with that. I just wanted to touch really quickly on the COPPA. If you work with websites or any of your clients work with websites that are specifically geared to children 13 or under, you need to include that in your privacy policy and you need to, if you said, are some things the same and some things different. If you are advertising specifically to children under 13, this is a major variant because you have to have parental controls and guidelines and things like that that you need to comply with. I just want you guys to be aware of moving on. Is you trying to reach children under 13 to them to look at a website or you're trying to reach the parents to sign them up for activities even if they are seven years old? So I represent a client that is a children's author and he has fuzzy gnomes and has created a fictitious world. We'll thank Dr. Seuss. He said, well, I'm not really advertising to the children. I'm advertising to the parents to get them to buy the books for their children. I'm like, yeah, but if somebody takes you to court and you have this fuzzy gnome and you're selling teddy bears or care bears, do you think that a court is gonna say that you're advertising specifically targeting children or not? And the answer is, yeah. I mean, you're selling a kid's product to kids and things like that. So he has to have fail safes in his privacy policy and how he does business where parental consent is what, do you have your parents permission to do this, you know, the law, the children's online privacy act is pretty specific about what you have to do to adhere. Really, anything on the internet. You can't stop a 13 year old in California from finding your website and signing up for a sewing kit and you're going towards 55 years old. Right, but the requirement for COPA is different in that you're specifically marketing to it. So if you're Disney World and you have children's content, the court is gonna find that that's a marketing, you're gearing your stuff towards children where a sewing kit, yes, a kid or a pirate, but what kind of legal liability or responsibility do you have? So it's, again, are you specifically marketing? Well, you just have a privacy policy is what your policy is, you're saying. And you stay in your privacy policy, if you're a sewing kit, you say I'm not specifically marketing to children under 13. Everyone can say that, but again, with somebody that came to me, that's probably not gonna hold up if you're selling dolls and things to your books or gear to children under six. It's kind of common sense on that. So I wanna talk to you about GDPR. I'm not gonna do a comprehensive, in-depth analysis of this. I want you guys to be aware of it. It's the new EU and Great Britain regulation that's coming into effect. And you might be asking me, Ryan, I'm not doing international law. I'm not selling to people in Europe. Why would I care? Because this law applies to you whether or not you're actually conducting business or not. It's whether an EU citizen visits your website and you collect sensitive, excuse me, data from them. And they take their data definition step further than we have here in the US. They actually have gone through the trouble of differentiating between personal data and sensitive data. So again, we talked about email addresses, first names, last names, things like that. They're now actually considering photos, if you take anybody's photo. And they're differentiating between the sensitive data for biometric data, the financial institutions that take your fingerprints, height, weight, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, things like that. And why they have taken, oh, I wanted to note, sorry, the online identifier with the IP addresses, again, is what you're gonna wanna be concerned with. Because it's not just that you now have the newsletter that is actively asking for their email address. If you have plugins on your site that are collecting the analytics or their IP addresses or the cookies, you're responsible for the plugins and also your processors. They've included joint liability. So you wanna make sure that you're using credible companies to handle and process your credit card information and queries. This is not all women doom and this is not all terror. WordPress is working on the GDPR project. They are extremely aware of it. They've published a lot of documentation. They're working to get these plugins certified and deal with the compliance aspects. But again, I want you to be knowledgeable about it because you're gonna be working with your clients to map out their processes. If you're designing websites, if you're doing the development, this is something that you have to consider now in design. Because you need to be limiting the amount of data that you're collecting only to what your client actually needs. Where before in the US, it's kind of in the wild, wild west to collect as much as you can. You're now responsible for what you collect, how you store it, who has access to it. So they differentiated between sensitive data and personal data so they could add additional consent requirements. So with the increased consent requirements, sensitive data, you now have to have explicit permission. Where with personal data, asking somebody for an email address and them entering it in sufficient. Clearly I'm consenting to give you my information. It's pretty cut and dry. You ask me for my email address, I give it to you. With the sensitive data, I have to have clear knowledge of why you're collecting it, what you intend to do with it. And the explicit consent comes in where you're no longer allowed to have the pre-checked boxes for privacy policies or things like that. It has to be opt in. So that's a design change that you guys are gonna wanna be aware of. And again, best practices. It's the law now in the EU. We have to adhere to it if we're collecting any of this data from citizens of the EU. But we're going this way in the US as well. We have Zuckerberg testifying before Congress about data and privacy issues. Silicon Valley is already saying, hey the GDPR has revamped, we should go in this direction too. So just be aware of this and start to style. The other thing is with this 72 hour notice of a breach requirement, that's gonna require testing. And again, the platforms and the plugins actually building this in is a major part of it. But it's something from a maintenance standpoint that you're gonna wanna talk to your clients about because you're gonna wanna test are they able to be aware of a breach and notify their users within 72 hours? This might be a continued managed service that you might offer as part of your maintenance plan of your developer and do that. We kind of already covered the affirmative consent versus explicit consent, which differentiates between the personal data and sensitive data. Anybody have questions about GDPR with what I covered? Nathan? I have two questions for you first. Yes sir. 72 hours from when you become aware of the breach or when it actually happens? When you become aware of the breach and it's as practicable. Practical, sorry. It's that sliding scale, we lawyers really like job security. So we try not to make hard line rules as much as possible so we can argue over things and you can pay us money to do it. So it's as soon as you become aware and they're going to the GDPR in the EU, they're gonna determine whether you knew or should have known, whether you should have done it in 72 hours and the longer you delay. We just had under armor, just had my fitness pal breach in January or February. I didn't get a notice. Two, three months went by and it was leaked on the news. So they're going to be prosecuting this and again, a lot of people in the US are like, well, I don't know how they're gonna do it. They're the same people that enforce the VAT tax. This is 26, 28 countries coming together to on one cohesive body of law and they're going to enforce it. So obviously I feel a little bit secure with my small business when there's a lot larger companies to go after first. But as of May 25th, we're gonna start seeing how this affects all of us. Yeah. So yeah, and second question is, so I've got a website, people sign up for email list. They may or may not be from Europe. I mean, if I don't have some sort of GDPR pop-up or ban or whatever, am I gonna get like a bill from the Hague or something for every violation or how does that work? Yeah, so they've created the data protection agencies and they're going through how that's going to work right now. So you actually have an ability to vote or weigh in or at least the EU developers and programmers do as far as what's going to happen because they have audits. They have a system actually. I'll send a link and I'll post a link to my site. The GDPR has a really good kind of like infographic of what happens with the first you get a warning, then you get some kind of like statement of misuse and then you start getting fined and they're prosecuting people. One of the things if you're collecting sensitive data, you're processing information, meaning storing information and a lot of people that have private servers do, you have to appoint a representative in the EU, which, yeah, yeah. So, like I said, with the state of Florida, you have to have a registered agent. They're doing the same thing for that. So you have to appoint somebody in the EU to accept service so they can sue you in the EU. Yeah. So that's, everyone's trying to figure out how this is gonna happen. I'm like, I know how it's gonna happen. Yeah. So I'm a career coach and I coordinate with from that, this analysis from the inventory of a lot of this sensitive information. Do I trust them to cover the protection of that information? If I'm partnered with them and paying them to provide that, or do I need to make sure I also have a protection on my side? So the responsibility is twofold. So the GDPR differentiates between data controllers and data processors. So data controller is the person who determines what information is collected, i.e. the person who's creating the website. Typically your client, not necessarily as much the developer. They're talking about the person that actually says, okay, I wanna collect email addresses, whatever. And the person that's actually processing the information. So a lot of times that's the stripe, the PayPal, the things like that. Again, these large companies are aware that the GDPR is coming into effect. That one of the exemptions under the 1995 law, because that's the last time it was revamped, was iCloud-based companies were exempt. And again, this has changed. It has no bearing of where you're located. It's if you're doing business collecting information from EU citizens, regardless of where you are. So you're gonna wanna have your GDPR compliant privacy policy in place. So it lists that company saying, I'm starting to move with Stripe for payment processing, yada yada yada. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, when I draft privacy policies, I put in there, there's a third party affiliates and they're responsible for their own privacy policy. I'm not responsible for their privacy policy, but you should be aware and take a look. Once you leave my site, they're information guides. But you absolutely wanna make sure when you're vetting people for who you do business with, there might be a really great new company coming up that's gonna give you a better deal on your swiping or whatever, but if they don't have the infrastructure and institution in place to protect and safeguard this information, you could be jointly liable for a breach. And again, they're gonna be looking at, should you know or should have known? They're gonna be looking at the totality of the circumstances for all of this stuff. So if it was a egregious negligent breach and I know I'm using a lot of legal terms, but I don't want you guys to be afraid. I want you to be informed and I want you to know what questions to ask and to know what laws that you should be looking at because that's gonna make, that's going to protect you on the early liability. Yes, ma'am. I have one more question. I'm so sorry. How do you vet an attorney to do this? Yeah. Because a lot of attorneys say, oh, I can help you with that. Just be a librarian. She didn't have, I mean Kentucky. So what do you want to, you know, practice in Kentucky? Well, no, so, I mean, hopefully I'm gonna have time to get to trademark and copyright. But first of all, you want to be looking for attorneys that have a background in e-commerce. It's not just business attorneys. Business attorneys with e-commerce background and intellectual property is a good place to start because intellectual property copyright trademark is ever evolving and it's very closely tied and related to technology. You can't be involved in, I mean, all of my clients that I deal with that are coming to me with trademarks and things like that are people that have website. Everyone has to have a website to be a business. So that's a really great place to start. But it's a great question that you do vet attorneys. You do interview us as much as we interview you to do our website. And it's something that people need to understand. You know, the internet has disrupted the way everyone delivers services and products. So the antiquated notion that you need to pay a $10,000 retainer in order to be able to ask a legal question is absurd. You need to find attorneys that are willing to quote per project flat fee pricing where possible. If it's a research project or something that they can't possibly calculate the amount of time, then it's gonna be hourly. But always ask what's included in that service. When I do trademarks, you know, I do that on a flat fee basis. I've seen people that have gone to attorneys that have billed on an hourly basis for the filing of the application. And then when the office action comes back from the examining attorney with the USPTO, they charge hourly for that response. The problem with that being every single trademark you ever file has an office action coming back from the examining attorney. Again, it's how we justify the fact that we actually read the contract as we find something that needs to be changed every single time. And so is that fair that you're paying for basically standard correspondence? Yes, it takes time, but I know how much time it's going to take before I get involved, right? So yeah, if you ever have questions about how to vet an attorney or somebody knows what they're talking about, yeah, feel free to ask me. I just had a client whose mother decided to help out with their trademark and filed a state trademark instead of a federal trademark in the wrong class. So not only did they just throw that money away, but they actually invited a lawsuit because they filed in a class that somebody else had already registered that name. And it's, yeah, I can help you with that, but we're not good at everything. Like I'm not a patent attorney. I'm not gonna try to do that. I'm not a family lawyer. I will never represent anyone in a divorce. I find the people that this is what they do because they're gonna be up to speed on what you need. I wanna talk quickly about terms of use. This is your conch. Yes, ma'am. You talked about the UK and the EU, but I didn't put the difference between the two. Is it just parallel? It's the same. So Brexit, the Great Britain actually departed from the EU, but they've signed on, at least now, for now to adhere to the GDPR. The one they leave, they'll have their own, but it'll be a very, we don't know what they're gonna do yet, but they don't know what they're gonna do yet. Right now they've signed on to the GDPR, so they're one of the companies that are, excuse me, the country that is complying and we need to be aware of. Thank you. Yes, ma'am. Okay, so terms of use. It's your contract in place between you and your end users. Similar to the privacy policy, it's something you typically wanna have a footnote in your website too. The reason you do this is to have a written and enforceable contract. You're gonna have a notice of the agreement. You, in your contract, are gonna be looking for key provisions and clauses, such as limiting damages. So if your site is unavailable for any reason or if you're developing for somebody and their site becomes unavailable, you can limit the damages to the amount that they've actually paid you. This is a contractual agreement between the two of you. Much like we had talked about previously with opt-in, where possible, especially if somebody's hiring you to do something and they're actually affirmatively paying you. Having that become an opt-in where they're, again, affirmatively consenting to these terms of use, it's gonna increase its enforceability. So I just want you guys to be aware of that. Again, looking at third party, excuse me, yeah, third party liability, your affiliates, your disclaiming. I'm not responsible once you leave my site for anything that they do. I'm not guaranteeing the services that they provide. Indemnification, yeah, if you heard, did somebody have questions about indemnification in general? Or are you guys kind of, okay. So indemnification, okay. Sorry. Yeah. So indemnification is basically, I'm not live, I'm not going to reimburse you for infringement or the costs, you know, if you provide me with conflicting or infringing work and I upload it to my site, then you're going to be responsible. And if I can go after you and have you pay for the legal fees as well. Then you're gonna want an indemnification clause in your terms of use. Jurisdiction, governing law, where they can sue you. This is huge because you're putting your website on the worldwide web. So you want to make sure that you're establishing that they can only sue you in the state in which you're located, where possible. And how they can sue you. If you wanted to consider an arbitration or mediation clause, the terms of use is a great place to do that. You also will prevent abuses by going through your specific payment policy, shipping policies if you have them. As clear as you can be about the rules that you intend to be bound by, the better off your terms of use are going to be. And again, we're talking about the compliance, the credibility and the deterrence. So be as specific as possible. And the termination clause. You're gonna want to have in your termination clause that you can shut down their account for their access to your site for any reason because you don't know if they post something that is lewd, lascivious, obscene, offensive. You want to reserve that right to yourself. Something else, we're kind of transitioning. So I just, does anyone have any questions about terms of use before I move on the copyright? Cause this is a kind of a transition. So in your terms of use, you're also gonna want to have a DMCA disclaimer. That's the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This is a free pro tip. This is free to do online. I provided you guys with the URL, with the online tutorial. But you're actually entitled to certain safeguards under the law by designating this agent. So if you have a website or a blog or something where you allow people to upload information, if you allow them to upload comments, reviews, photos or anything that could be potentially infringing or they could claim that they have a copyright too and you're infringing by making use of it, you're gonna wanna designate a copyright agent. You're going to get safeguards and productions. I've also taken the liberty of giving you guys a free DMCA sample clause for your terms of use. I don't expect you guys to write it down. I will upload my slides and you can take pictures if you want. But this is something that is, switch out your name for website and corp. But that's the adequate clause that you put in your terms of use in addition to registering with the Library of Congress for the copyright. So, differences between copyright and trademark. Yay, who knows the difference? Yes. So, trademark is when you're applying for a registered name and copyright is just saying that you have this material is your unique own. That's not officially registered as. Perfect. So, a trademark is again. So you get a gold star? Yes, you do get a gold star and you get a book. Oh, yay! Yay! It's an indicator of source. It tells your clients and your customers where something comes from. It can be a word like the word Nike or the word McDonald's. It can be an image like the golden arches or the swoosh. It can be a saying, I'm loving it, just do it. Any of those things are tree markable. I know I'm on the copyright slide but I'm differentiating so we'll go on from there. The copyright is your actual work of authorship. It's a unique expression or idea. Ideas themselves are not copyrightable. Like Romeo and Juliet, how many times have we seen this story over and over and over again? The idea itself of two Star Cross lovers is not unique. It's the actual expression. So that specific work, that screenplay, that interpretation of it is the thing that is able to be copyrighted. So when we look at things that can be copyrighted, it's sound recordings, the underlying music, website layouts, specific dance moves even. You know, I haven't filed for copyright for mine yet. So legal benefits of registering the copyright, oh, I wanted to tell you. So you guys have copyright when it's fixed in a tangible medium, which is the legal definition of what it means is as soon as you guys write something down, sketch it on a piece of paper, type it up on your website or write it down. You actually have copyright. You don't have to do anything impermanently to have copyright. The reason that you register with the Library of Congress for copyright is your ability to force it against infringement. So going through the benefits, it's the evidence of the proof of ownership. You actually are a matter of public record that you own this work, the innocent infringer defense. Oh, I didn't know it was copyrighted. Yeah, it's a matter of record. You could have looked it up. You chose to use that work without permission. So that's the enforceability aspect. Statutory damages. When you're suing for copyright infringement, it's a lot, it's very difficult sometimes to prove actual damage. How much money do I lose when you use my name and likeness? How much business do you actually take away from me? So when you actually have it registered with the Library of Congress, you're entitled to statutory damages, which is a lot easier to prove. And I have between 750 and 30,000 per infringement and you're entitled to attorney's fees, which if you're looking for an attorney to take the case, it's a lot easier to find one when you've actually copyrighted it because they know when they win the case that they're actually going to get their attorney's fees back. And that gets, yeah, yeah. Because I mean, no, I mean, as small business owners, we don't have $30,000 to throw it out in a suit. But if you have a prevailing case and the attorney knows that they're gonna get attorney's fees on the other side, a lot of times you can negotiate a contingency on some of those. So. I wanted to ask a question about that. Yes, ma'am. Absolutely. So, we see like in Facebook, right? The people will say, this is the K-Facet, I was talking about K-Facet designer, K-Facet support group on Facebook. There's 15 of them, right? But in the description you say it's not the official K-Facet website, the Facebook group, the free group. How does that apply when he's a branded need that maybe does not have his name copyrighted? What's the open liability to that? Because so many times this group is afraid that they can push to a website that's a payable membership. Yeah, that's a complex, and actually a complex. I'm sorry. No, no, no, no, no, no. I just, I can't cover it and get to tree marks. But what I will say is, so that's actually a name and likeness issue. So they're private, we're entitled to a certain level of privacy as individuals. When we are famous, when we do things that, and it's actually a sliding scale, when you look at defamation, libel, what we're allowed to say or do to someone is actually dependent on their level of familiarity and fame. So famous people have a right, they get parodied. We're allowed to make use of their likeness and their name in certain regards when you're detracting from their livelihood and they can get an injunction, they can stop that if they want to. But they have to, there's a certain amount of, in copyright, fair use. So there's certain things where you're allowed to use certain in group. Right, being a fan group, Bob? Well, not necessarily a fan group, because again, if they're making commercial profit, if you're a fan group and they're charging money and they're taking away from my fan group, then I can show that they're commercially profiting from my name and my life, but it's a lawsuit, which that person is entitled to bring, but again, they're gonna balance out, well, you're a famous person, what's the harm, really, is what they're looking at. Name like us, fair use. Fair use, copyright, education, there's certain things that are not infringing. So like, SNL, parody, things like that. There's standards of what's acceptable and what's not how you can use it, but it is an electoral property that's allowable and that's a case-by-case basis. Yeah, you're gonna want to talk to me about that, that's not, I want you guys to have the tools for the questions and things that you can, I can help you with very easily and you guys can save lots of money. What was your question? Is there a place where I can check something that I have created against fair use and copyright? You can go to the Library of Congress and search their database for a certain copyrightable material. I know the material, like the whole thing is copyrighted, but I used maybe a part of a sentence. Okay, so I'm an English teacher, I made a- I'm an English major and it wasn't my English teacher, so thank you for your service. I was like, you don't hear that with teachers, thank you for your service, but it is a service and thank you. You're welcome. I wasn't your teacher, but I'm glad you were fun. So I made a figurative language worksheet lesson plan thing and I used Kinder-Klimar song lyrics. So there's the song lyric, they have to identify what it means and then they have to identify what the, like on the surface meaning and then be intended deeper meaning. So I didn't quote like a whole song anywhere and it's from a series of his songs. So it's like a sentence fragment or a sentence from this song and two lines from another song. Two separate issues. First of all, what do you intend to do with this? Are you using an educator? Well, I use it in my classroom, but I also want to sell it. Okay, using it in your classroom as part of the education institutional typically falls under for use. I can't tell you again, you're going to want to consult with somebody, but your use within the classroom shouldn't be a problem. You selling it might be a problem and here's a fun thing. So first of all, if you were mixing this or remixing it into a song, what you're doing is called sampling. You're taking a piece of somebody else's work that is absolutely infringing and problematic. And again, when I said earlier, we attorneys like to not make clear rules and so we can argue about stuff. There's no clear rule on how much constitutes sampling. So when you think about it, it's like, well, I just took two notes. Cool. Where those notes, duh-duh, duh-duh, it only takes two notes, right? So, you know, it's a sliding scale of what's infringing and what's not. You know, be careful about selling it. Okay. And yeah, talk to an attorney about that one and have them look at it closer. It might not be a problem, I'm sure. Want to make sure you guys have the copyright notice, have it at the bottom of all of your footers. Again, I told you guys everything's copyrighted and as soon as you actually fix it in a tangible medium, but this puts people on actual notice that you are claiming copyright. So in the event that there was an infringement suit, you can point to this. Difference between TM and R, pro tip. You guys can use TM if you're claiming trademark rights in your name, your logo, whatever, prior to actually filing for registration at a federal level. The R is for actual, after it's been approved, your application has gone through and you have a registration number. So I wanted you guys to know what the difference between that is and also what it means when you're looking at other people's sites. Additional benefits for federally protecting your trademark. Number one, you get federal protection when you're using it in interstate commerce, which means you're precluding other people from using your mark in the other 50 states. So you're allowed to use it, other people are not. You want to consider doing this fairly early on before you spend tens of thousands of dollars in years of your life pouring your blood, sweat, and equity into your company to find out that somebody else has that name and you're infringing on it. Not only can they come after the harm and damage that you've done, but make you change your name and marketing and everything. So I recently, again, the client that had the mom that helped them with the trademark, they've been doing business for seven years and never filed the trademark and found out that two years ago, somebody filed in the international class that they've been operating in and they've, I mean, they had a restaurant, they've invested, all of this and it was easily preventable. So I want to tell you guys the filing fee for trademarks is $275. That's the federal filing fee that does not include legal fees for what an attorney will charge you to do the preliminary search to see if there's any competition, thanks. Sorry, running through. Anyway, trademark your stuff, ask me more questions. I'll get you the slides. I ran out of time. I apologize very much. I will be in the happiness bar if you guys have additional follow-up questions, if there's anything I can help you with. Yes, oh, and I'll leave you on this slide. Are you gonna bill us if we guys get a question in the end? Yeah, I'm gonna say no, no, no. It is amazing collaborative. This is your first word, can't get involved, it gets addictive, everybody's secure to help, so. Is it required to have the copyright line at the bottom? It's not required and it's additional protection for yourself. Oh, okay. Not complying with the law is, I mean, required. You can do whatever you want, but there's gonna be different consequences for doing or not doing. He's asking you to do a follow-up. I do not. He's asking you to do a follow-up. Not your entry.