The beginning of the year presents a great time to consider a variety of creative business legal issues. From copyrights to trademarks to contracts to business formation, every creative business that wants to be profitable and grow will think about their legal needs for the coming year.
Here Are Some Key Creative Business Legal Issues for the New Year:
- Register Your Copyrights: If you created anything in the past year, or plan to create anything in the new year (and if you are a creative business, I really hope that you have), then the best thing you can do for yourself is to register your copyrights. Copyright registration is cheap, not complicated, and will help you enforce your rights if someone uses your work without asking (professional photographers are religious about this, and you should be, too).
- Think About Your Brand: Every business has a brand. With any brand comes trademark rights. That means that you likely have trademark rights, even if you don’t have a registered trademark. And if you have a brand that you consider valuable, it would make sense to consider applying for a federal registration for that mark. And if you are going to register your trademark, you want to think a little bit about how not to get your registration rejected.
- Improve Your Contracts: You may have a good set of contracts that you use in your business, but as your business changes, so should your contracts. You might have had issues come up in the past year that could have been addressed in a well-drafted contract and want to address them now. You might have new needs that have arisen as your business has grown (for instance, you might plan to hire your first employees or protect valuable intellectual property).
- Consider Business Formation: If you are going to set up a business entity (e.g. an LLC, a corporation, etc.), the start of the year might be the right time to do it. In many states, there is a minimum annual tax (for instance, in California there is a minimum annual tax of $800 for LLCs) and by getting set up at the start of the year, you can make that minimum go further.
Obviously, this is not an exhaustive list by any stretch, but it should give you a sense of the types of things worth thinking about. Depending upon what you do in your business and what kinds of issues you have had in the past year, you will have different concerns.
Don’t Be Afraid To Talk To A Lawyer About This Stuff
Many people are afraid to talk to a lawyer. True, there is a good deal of work that you can do on your own, and many things that you can figure out on your own, but there is no replacement for solid legal advice. I know that there is a good deal of resistance to the idea (sometimes cost is a big issue), but getting your head around these issues early on in the year by working with a lawyer can help you avoid many of the problems that can sap energy, time, and resources down the road.
