Laura's Winning Ideas

I regularly rail about the folly of violating copyright.

Look at the Other Side of the Coin

However, I have an alternative viewpoint when my own copyright is violated. When folks “borrow” my materials, I am thrilled so long as they attribute the work to me and/or my website.

I was not born with this enlightened perspective.

Back in 1996, I was writing my training manual, The Magic of Winning Proposals. Friends were subcontracted to help me write and edit the manual. I threw all the pages up on the web, so everyone would have one source for the latest version of each page. I knew the search engine spiders would eventually find these pages, and made a note to myself to remove them as soon as possible. (This was before a small operator could easily firewall portions of their website, and FTP was too slow for our purposes.)

At the same time, I was new in my consulting practice. I was tracking my time carefully so I could figure out my split of of hours spent on billable, marketing, and administrative tasks. Because I was tracking my hours, I knew exactly how much time I spent responding to freeloaders. Freeloaders are the folks who called and snowed me as to their actual ability to pay for my advice. They would talk about hiring me, pick my brains, ask for a full blown proposal and then disappear. I knew I had to get better at screening freeloaders so I could spend my time in a fashion that would pay the mortgage.

After a few weeks work on my training manual, the search engines found my pages. I was surprised to see that these draft pages rose in the search engines over my carefully written home page and website pages. I was determined to wrap things up in the next 3 weeks and take those pages down.

However, I noticed something that didn’t make sense. The hours I spent on freeloaders dropped off to almost nothing. And, I’d started getting thank you notes from people who couldn’t afford to hire a consultant or trainer, but who needed some tidbit of information about my areas of expertise, Winning Proposals and Building Virtual Teams.

I’m a sociologist by training, and figured out what was happening. Some folks needing help couldn’t afford to hire me. They would find my website, and knew I had knowledge they needed but could not afford. When they were unsuccessful finding answers to their questions, they would begin to justify their “need” against my “fees.” Then, they would approach me to get the help they needed without paying me, and justified a dishonest approach because I was “withholding” from them.

Without realizing it, I’d created a negative vortex that was costing me hours of wasted effort, PLUS eliminating any positive impression that might result in work for me in the future. With this mindset, these people would never come back to hire me when their firm got bigger. With this mindset, they couldn’t regard me well. With this mindset, they wouldn’t remember me and call when they’d moved on to a larger firm where my services would be helpful.

This stopped when I “gave away” my training manual.

And I’ve been given contracts by people who found my manual, used it, and later were in a position to expand their expertise, and hired me to help them.

Funny thing is, I’ve never lost a contract because my manual is available on-line for free. Larger firms who can afford my services realize there are lots of books on my topic. They aren’t buying my manual, they are buying my expertise and ability to motivate their staff.

My competitors were sure I was nuts.They can’t believe I have my training manual on-line, though some of them are catching on to the profitability of “giving it away.”

My clients regularly get the pitch to cut costs by giving away data. One of my clients, a fortune 50 company, realized they’d wasted thousands on sales calls because they had a database they’d locked behind their firewall that non-customers needed to query. Once they unlocked the database and “leaked” the URL to the query page, they dropped a nice percent of sales calls (costing $5,000 each) and got thank you notes instead.

What valuable materials are you keeping locked away that are costing you money by witholding them from the wild?

When I was in college, a radical campus group petitioned for funding from Student Government. I was Student Body President, and we were happy to supply these radicals with the tools they sought, portable video cameras (back then, portable was a 40 pound contraption with trailing cables to a big box recorder on a dolly, that trailed behind the cameraperson. They called themselves National Town Meeting.

Their idea was that technology was reaching a point at which democracy could be a reality. That is, that voters, if provided the information in a video feed, could decide for themselves what government should or should not do, rather than relying on representatives to make the decisions for them. They traipsed around putting all sorts of meetings on the campus television channel. It was radical stuff to roll in and broadcast a Board of Trustees meeting. This level of publicity was uncomfortable at the time. National Town Meeting dared to tape the Illinois State Legislature in session and were threatened with arrest.

Years later, CSpan was authorized and it became normal to tune in to local, state and federal governing sessions in action. Boring, but normal.

Today, we call this Transparency and consider it a virtue to be willing to lay bare the mechanics of governance.

President Elect Obama used the internet to communicate with his campaign volunteers and staff to an overwhelming extent.

During the transition they continued the practice. One example, was a “Seat at the Table.” This policy provides notes of all meetings with outsiders, and posts documents from those meetings on-line. The website is set up as a blog, with the opportunity to comment and make suggestions.

Websites for transparency of the spending on the stimulus package are already up at www.recovery.gov

I love hearing that government agencies are gearing up to get more on-line than ever before. GSA is leading the way with management of their site, www.USA.gov encouraging new uses for the site and assisting agencies.

Some state governments have already learned the economics of transparency. Here in Wisconsin, an amazing amount of state business can be conducted on-line, saving plenty of labor and time for both government and citizens. The expense of transitioning might be born by the stimulous bill, with savings that continue long after.

If your clients are government agencies, how can you help? Are there ideas you have about digitizing technical data for public access? What would streamline services if only you could . . .

Are you on-line to the extent suitable?

Once again, copyright is in the news.

David Klein

This time, an artist, Richard Prince has been sued for copyright infringement. The case was filed in New York District Court, alleges that Prince violated copyright when he scanned photographs from a book, printed them onto canvas, and then painted on top of them, adding evocative elements like face paint and electric guitars.

His defense is that he “transformed” the original image and so is free of the tethers of copyright. (Yeah. right.)

Don’t do this at your firm. Like running with scissors, letting your scanner substitute for legitimate licensed images is dangerous.

There’s a great article in the Wall Street Journal about this case. Click here for the link free for the next week. (After that you’ll need a subscription to get this article on-line: Color This Area of the Law Gray)

There are some instances in which “transformation” will pass muster. Like the time that Jeff Koons was inspired by a fashion photo of a woman’s legs with dangling sandal. He’d massaged the image so much that only the photographer could see the resemblance.

Even so, if he’d been a businessperson instead of an artist with renown legal representation, I suspect he would not have prevailed.

Satire is another shield for artists, but in business, it makes you look petty to satirize a competitor.

Don’t think that you can “transform” the logo of your competitor and come off looking good nor staying outside the legal protection afforded trademarks and copyrighted images.

Keep it clean out there, and don’t run with scissors scanned images!