I just listened to Johanna Blakley’s Lessons from fashion’s free culture on TED.com, talking about how the fashion industry survives without copyright protection. Fashion designers have trademark protection, but not copyright. The courts decided clothes are utilitarian, so there’s no copyright.

Lots of industries don’t have copyright. Food dishes, recipes, auto body sculpture, tattoos, and many other so-called utilitarian things don’t get copyright. Not even comedians get copyright. They can steal each others jokes.

But wait a minute: books, movies, television shows. They copy each other all the time, don’t they? Detective shows, reality shows, sports movies, buddy cop movies. How many times have you seen the one where the misfit kids get together and win the league right at the end, stealing the championship from the snobby kids? And yet films are copyrighted.

And software? Software code and even look and feel can be copyrighted, but it gets copied all the time anyway. Not just copied as in pirate copies, but copied as in how much one publisher’s version looks like another publisher’s. I’ve followed spreadsheets for years, and what started as Visicalc became Lotus 1-2-3 and then Microsoft Excel. The same thing, basically, but better.

In writing, I copy people I like to read. In athletics, I’ve seen for years how the younger kids copy the older kids, and get better. It’s what we humans do. Copying is the sincerest form of flattery.

In her talk (the link above) Johanna Blakely suggests that the way the fashion designers live without copyright might give us a hint for other industries. She tells the story of a prestigious fashion designer asked about the cheap knock-offs. The answer: their buyers aren’t in our market.

I can deal with all of this copying as part of innovation and creativity. Software I’ve done has been copied a lot, and I can live with that. Mine has to be better to survive, and if it isn’t, well, tough. What I hate though, is:

• Copying in marketing and sales: copying packaging, tag lines, slogans, pitches, and so on. It’s legal, but I hate it. The courts really don’t protect packaging look and feel very well at all.
• Straight lie-through-the-teeth copying. People who take my blog post, word for word, and put it on their blog under their byline. People who claim somebody else’s work as their own.

So there. Most copying is legal. Stand on your competitor’s shoulders, do something better, and it’s called fashion or creativity or style or something like that, maybe even progress. But don’t say somebody else’s work is your own. And don’t say that copying packaging or tag lines or slogans or pitches is anything but just copying. That’s bad karma, if nothing else.

“I don’t get no respect!” That was Rodney Dangerfield’s catchphrase.

I say this is terribly true today in the universe of electronic communications where, I point out, it is we that don’t give any respect. In our typing and our composition we are lazy, slovenly, careless, thoughtless, nonchalant — in short, downright disrespectful — and we don’t seem give a whatever about it…until we get no respect ourselves. Then we’re upset.

• We misspell names of people and businesses.
• We incorrectly name businesses and organizations.
• We ignore capitalization of proper names and trademark names.
• We misquote people, using incorrect words.
• We type famous quotes, but attribute them to the wrong people.
• We don’t check our sources to see if they are real or a hoax.
• We post and publish incorrect links.

Yeah, yeah, so what? Who cares? You know, you know what I mean.

Businesses can’t be so cavalier. Their success depends on enforceable copyrights, brand name identification, proper use of product names, tag lines, quotes, successful SEO, correct URLs, etc.

To start with, misspelling someone’s name is just plain rude. Our names, our choice of spelling, our inclusion of middle names, initials, nicknames are an integral part of how we present ourselves to the world, and how we see, hold, and validate ourselves. When you misspell or incorrectly capitalize someone’s name you are directly insulting them. In my opinion they have every right to be angry.

A misspelling could mean a reader couldn’t find a volume, and an author doesn’t sell a book. A misspelling could mean an innocent person can be harassed for the financial dealings of some ne’er-do-well.

For bloggers and online authors, misspelling other peoples’ names can alienate those folks, and the important trackbacks, reciprocal links and mutual admiration referrals and recommendations may never materialize for you.

When someone reviews our Business Plan Pro product but calls it, say BizinessPro Writer, we lose customers. It can, and will happen to your product as well. When you refer to a product or company or website, check to be sure you are using the correct name.

Ignoring capitalization of letters in names can cause confusion, and possibly a loss of copyright protection. For instance, we all know that Twitter is the proper name of a social communication network, and twitter is a bird song. The soft drink is spelled Coke, but coke is a narcotic and a coal derivative used in making steel.

As another example, take jello. Jell-O [note the capitalization now, if you haven't before] is the protected trade-name, but it has become a generic word for any type of gelatin-based dessert. Go to the store and you’ll see Knox, Royal, a local private label maybe, but to the customer they are all jello and they don’t care which one they buy. You can be sure that Jell-O cares.

Adobe’s Photoshop is well on its way to becoming an eponymous term. Now anytime someone makes a casual remark about manipulating pictures, they say they photoshoped it, regardless of which digital image editing software program they actually used.

It costs businesses billions annually in marketing branding efforts to keep their brand names visible, unique, known and purchased. But lazy, thoughtless, careless typing works everyday to negate the value of your marketing efforts.

No end of trouble, misinterpretation, bad feelings, feuds, lawsuits, destroyed public images and reputations have come about because of misquoting. Something as small as a single letter or two (could, would, should) can change the entire meaning of your business’ publicly made statement of concern to one of callous indifference, and the survival of your company.

Many quotes from literature and famous people from years past have slipped into our vernacular. They are often misquoted and misattributed. Brush up your Shakespeare by Michael Macrone has an entire chapter on popular phrases which people think came from the Bard, but did not. “The long and the short of it” “Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorn’d” “Fool’s Paradise” are just few.

This problem is certainly not limited to age-old authors. “Play it again, Sam” – was a line never spoken by Ingrid Bergman or Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. “Houston, we have a problem.” This is a misstatement of the actual communication between the Apollo 13 astronauts and Mission Control in Houston. Your credibility suffers when you incorrectly quote, or assign the words to the wrong person.

Recently, the U.K. mainstream media was caught not checking their sources adequately. They printed quotes from an elegy for Michael Jackson, from a Twitter post ostensibly by Foreign Secretary, David Miliband. The tweet was actually by a Twitter impostor, a case of identity theft. A significant lapse in due diligence. It damaged the public position of the Foreign Secretary, and discredited the reputation and trustworthiness of those media.

Posting bad links is sloppy and unnecessary. At best, it irritates readers who get the 404 Errors, or end up on a page that has nothing to do with the original publishing. Worse, a bad link loses customers/visitors/business at the intended link. If the author gets affiliate or click-through revenue, publishing a link without checking its accuracy is like throwing money away.

It is time we electronic digital communicators put some polite respect back into our writings. Use spell checkers, proof read, double check and spell correctly the names of people, businesses and products. Don’t assume you’ve got it right. The power of the Internet is just a click away.

After all, if you expect to be respected, you have to show the same respect to others.

Steve Lange
Palo Alto Software

Darren Dahl brought back some bad memories with his A Small-Business Guide to Intellectual Property in The New York Times last week. Not that his story is off base, either: He seems to have things pretty much straight. Even so, he may be way too optimistic. Out here in the real world, from my experience at least, things are often worse.

For the first example, he tells how Daniel Lubetzky discovered that a competitor had done a knock-off package that looked like his company’s snack bar:

He kept hearing how one of his competitors had copied the packaging, look and feel of his bars.

Fortunately for Mr. Lubetzky, he had secured crucial components of intellectual property like trademarks, trade dress (the look and feel of a product) and web addresses after founding his company. Unlike a patent, which can cost up to $25,000 to secure, trademarks and web addresses can be obtained relatively cheaply and without the aid of a lawyer.

Several years ago my company had a bad experience with a competitor who brought out a new box that was so much like our market-leading box that our sales reps called complaining we’d brought out a new product without telling them. We had one of the best intellectual property lawyers I’ve ever heard of, and we had all the trademark protection he could think of, but it turned out that copying packaging is not illegal. You watch the key trademarks, make things look the same, and the consumer gets fooled.

You’re probably thinking we didn’t have the right lawyers, but if so, take a stroll down the retail shelves of any office superstore or a grocery store and count how many packages look like their competitors. The imitators copy market leaders.

I think the package knock-off strategy sucks. But it also works. People make money that way. And most of the time, it’s not illegal, and trademarks and copyright are easy to work around.

And then, second example, patents: The patent system is broken. Just read what Wikipedia says about patent trolls. Here’s what a patent troll does:

• Purchases a patent, often from a bankrupt firm, and then sues another company by claiming that one of its products infringes on the purchased patent
• Enforces patents against purported infringers without itself intending to manufacture the patented product or supply the patented service
• Enforces patents but has no manufacturing or research base
• Focuses its efforts solely on enforcing patent rights

Unless you’re running a business, you probably have no idea how widespread this is. My company is a small business, barely 40 employees, and we got caught in it. And I know a guy who had a family photo-sharing site, no employees, and he got caught by one. He had no revenue, but he still had to pay $1,000.

But to be fair to Darren Dahl, he doesn’t talk about patent trolls, but he does summarize very well the frustration of patents in general:

Actually, what a patent does is give you the right to prevent someone else from producing what your patent covers. “Having a strong I.P. position helps ensure that other people pay you for your innovation like they would a toll on a road,” Mr. Kocher said.

But even if you do have a patent, there’s no guarantee that someone won’t try to get around it. There’s also no guarantee that you will win if you fight that person. But if you have your I.P. ducks in a row and a commitment to do whatever you can to defend those rights, you do have a fighting chance–even in a fight against a much larger company.

I don’t want to be too negative, but sometimes it seems that the “fighting chance” he mentions is also too optimistic. The world of high technology is littered with the corpses of companies that eventually won their cases on appeal, but the company was lost in the meantime.

And I’m not saying that as an entrepreneur you should ignore patents, trademarks or copyright. No. You do what you can to protect yourself as best you can; but don’t think that it’s easy. And don’t think the system actually works.

Be different. Do things the opposite of what people expect. That sets you apart. It’s a new age, an age of infinite splitting of big groups into smaller groups. Think of Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail or Seth Godin’s The Dip.

What reminded me of this was browsing through Leo Babauta’s blog Zen Habits yesterday, enjoying a few minutes to delve into something I like and miss too often, when I discovered his post Feel Free to Steal My Content.

Among other (related) things, he says:

This post is an official notification that my writing here at Zen Habits and in the Zen To Done ebook are now in the public domain. I hereby waive all claim of copyright in this work; it may be used or altered in any manner without attribution or notice to me. Attribution, of course, is appreciated.

I’m impressed. It surprised me, interested me and impressed me. I’ve lived on–depended on–copyright for several decades. I raised a family on copyright. I wouldn’t do what Leo did there. I do admire it, though.

Zen Habits has more than 50,000 readers. It’s very well written. It’s very well positioned. I wouldn’t have the courage to do what he did with that post; but it does fit the general style of the whole site. So maybe there’s a business lesson in that.

Surprising can be a very strong attribute of a new startup. Surprising becomes remarkable, and remarkable becomes word of mouth, presence and power.

It makes me think.