Trademarking Your Intellectual Property

Mike Hambright (00:00.915)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Today we have an exciting guest. We’re gonna be talking about how to protect your intellectual property in your business and we’re gonna talk about what that even could mean for your business. It could be a lot of different things with the one and only Angela Langlotz. She is actually my attorney on these issues here and the person that I recommend every time I hear somebody say, hey, I need to register my trademark or protect this or that, she is the go-to person. So Angela, great to see you.

Angela (00:26.722)
Thank you for having me, Mike. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Mike Hambright (00:29.245)
Yeah, yeah, very exciting to talk about this stuff here. And I say exciting, a lot of people don’t think it’s exciting until it becomes a problem and then it’s like a nightmare, right? yeah, I’m sure you’ve seen all sorts of horror stories. Maybe, let’s talk about that in just a moment. Like what is the worst you’ve seen kind of happen? But before we do that, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background?

Angela (00:37.794)
Right?

Angela (00:46.157)
Yeah.

Angela (00:52.206)
Okay, well, I practiced trademark and copyright law when I first started my practice back in 1999. I was working to help families with a lot of generational wealth protect their assets. And now I still help entrepreneurs protect their assets, just a different type of asset. And that is their intellectual property, things like copyrights, trademarks.

trade secrets, things like that. My practice mostly focuses on trademarks and copyrights. So I help people identify, protect, and monetize their valuable brands and creations.

Mike Hambright (01:36.959)
Yeah, that’s awesome. And a lot of times as entrepreneurs, we’re very proud of our brand. we’ve worked so hard to build it, right? So whatever it is that it’s a shame if you, in fact, you protected one of my brands. I’ll mention that here at some point. But, you know, we work really hard to kind of build these brands and these businesses. And it’s not even so much, it’s like what it means to us, like emotionally, right? And so, yeah.

Angela (01:45.282)
Yeah.

Angela (01:51.374)
That’s good.

Angela (01:57.198)
Mm-hmm.

Angela (02:02.734)
Sure. Well, there’s a little bit of that, but also remember too, you don’t have physical business assets like property, plant, and equipment, you have to ask yourself, where does your business valuation come from? And it comes from, if you don’t have property, plant, or equipment, it comes from goodwill. So goodwill is valued in things like trademarks.

copyrights, it’s basically what we call business goodwill is actually the difference between what your business is worth and the value of the property, plant, and equipment. So if you don’t have property, plant, and equipment in your business, all you have is goodwill, and you need to protect that with a registered trademark or through copywriting your software or your, like, if you sell procedures manuals or

coaching courses or anything like that, that can be protected via a copyright. So this type of property, we call it intellectual property, that’s kind of the umbrella term for things like trademarks and patents and copyrights, trade secrets, things like that, that really represents the value of your business. So it’s not just an emotional thing, it’s really a dollars and cents thing, where when you go to sell your business,

Mike Hambright (03:22.687)
Yeah.

Angela (03:30.358)
your trademarks and copyrights and other forms of intellectual property are actually things that can be valued by a business valuation expert when you go to sell your business.

Mike Hambright (03:41.279)
For sure. Yeah. I’d say, you know, my first, so my very first, I started podcasting. I was one of the first real estate podcasters in the world. Number six or seven, something like that. Under the Flip Nerd brand, which you helped me trademark not only the Flip Nerd phrase, but also the, emblem, which is the house with glasses on it. Kind of the nerdy nerd glasses, right? And yeah. And, and for a while when I was running that we didn’t have that trademarked and then we did. And, then,

Angela (03:48.376)
Mmm. Wow.

Mm-hmm.

Angela (04:00.13)
Yep, the nerd glasses.

Mike Hambright (04:09.885)
then we have to maintain that, right? And I, you know, it’s one of those things that you just kind of do. It’s like insurance, from my perspective, it’s like insurance, like I probably never need it, but I’ll be glad if I had it type thing. And sure enough, somebody started after about 10 years and…

Angela (04:24.312)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (04:24.479)
you know millions of dollars of investing in this brand, our blood, sweat and tears going to this for a long period of time, somebody started using a house with glasses on it. And then I called my bulldog, which is you, Angela Langlotz, and you started to send them nasty letters and then eventually they backed down. But that was…

Angela (04:29.315)
Yeah.

Angela (04:42.968)
Okay.

Mike Hambright (04:44.383)
And that was from an imp like our emblem, like not even the a lot of people think of the trademark. I guess me mostly I thought of the trademark is like the name, but they weren’t really infringing on our name. It was something else geeks and they had a house with glasses on it and and but it was the emblem, you know, which was probably the thing that identifies us the most is kind of the thing that is what people would see and know, right?

Angela (04:52.14)
Right?

Angela (04:58.307)
Yep.

Angela (05:04.418)
Right?

Yeah, I mean, people typically think of trademarks as a word, but a trademark can be anything, a word, a symbol, a tagline. It can even be a color. It can be a sound. It can be a scent. It can be anything that distinguishes your goods and services from other people’s goods and services. So some of these, I call them kind of weird trademarks because they’re not a phrase. They’re not a symbol. They’re not a…

word, play dough, example, that distinctive play dough scent that is actually registered as a trademark with the trademark office. And it’s interesting to read the description. It’s something like kind of an almond cherry scent. They described it right. So how do you submit your proof of use? You actually have to send the play dough to the trademark office.

Mike Hambright (05:45.257)
Wow. Yeah.

Angela (06:05.342)
As a sample, we call it a specimen in trademark law. Sounds like that little thing that you leave in the little box at the doctor’s office, but it’s not. So we actually have to send in a proof of how the trademark is being used. So in this case, they send some Play-Doh to the trademark office, and that’s in a file someplace or a box or something, I don’t know, at the trademark office as proof of their use of that.

Mike Hambright (06:15.038)
Yeah.

Angela (06:35.214)
cherry, doughy, almondy smell for Play-Doh. So literally it can be anything. What’s another example of a weird trademark? a color. So if a color is distinctive and other people aren’t using it and it’s not functional, you can actually register a color as a trademark. For example, a big green egg. I’m sure you’re familiar if you’re a barbecue fan.

Mike Hambright (06:57.502)
Mm.

Mike Hambright (07:01.747)
Yeah, the smoker.

Angela (07:04.428)
You’re familiar with Big Green Egg, right? So they have these, they call them Komodo barbecues. It’s like a clay barbecue and it’s called Big Green Egg. And Big Green Egg, that’s the name of their company, actually owns the color green for barbecues. Nobody else can make a green barbecue because Big Green Egg owns the trademark. You can make a red barbecue.

Mike Hambright (07:27.081)
Wow, I didn’t know that.

Angela (07:32.524)
or blue barbecue, but you can’t make a green barbecue. It’s very interesting. Yeah.

Mike Hambright (07:36.049)
Yeah, that’s interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So let’s talk about for entrepreneurs, you know, well, we’ll talk about real estate investors or other folks like what are some of the things that they could obviously trademark their brand and their logo. Now, you said you talked about distinct processes and things like that, like a lot of businesses. Don’t have, mean, the process.

Angela (07:44.077)
Hmm?

Angela (07:47.758)
Sure. Yeah.

Mike Hambright (07:58.911)
What’s interesting is we constantly change our processes I guess so like how do you for what I maybe give some examples of Entrepreneurs like smaller entrepreneurs, I guess that have a process I could see if it’s like a formula for something, but if it’s like a process for how you do business How do you create something that’s unique enough to be trademarkable like what’s an example of that?

Angela (08:08.215)
Mm-hmm.

Angela (08:21.698)
Okay, so we’re confusing a little bit, patent and trademark. So remember patents are for anything useful. So if you have a useful business process, you may be able to protect that using what’s called a business method patent. So you can do that. It has to be new. Okay, so novel, has to be novel and it has to be non-obvious. So if what you’re doing,

Mike Hambright (08:25.468)
Okay, okay.

Mike Hambright (08:39.592)
Okay.

Angela (08:50.442)
is new, but it’s obvious it’s not eligible for patent protection because it has to be new and non-obvious. And then there’s a whole separate process for that. I don’t do patents. What most of my clients are protecting as far as their intellectual property, especially in the real estate space, are people who do coaching and training and courses. And there are a ton of people out there who have real estate businesses.

who are teaching other people how to do what they do. So they will, for example, have a coaching program, or they will have an online course, or they will have some kind of manual or process manual. And I’ll talk about how to protect each of those things. So we’ve got trademark, which is protecting your brand identity, your…

Course identity, if you’re using that course name as your exclusive course name, we can protect that. And then there’s the creative work that is protectable under copyright law. So things that would be protectable under copyright law are things like, let’s say that you have a proprietary software and you want to protect the software code, not the process that the software allows you to do, but the code itself.

Remember that copyright is for anything creative. So if it is creative and you’ve reduced it to, this is the term we use, a tangible medium of expression, meaning you’ve written it down, usually that’s what it means in this context, you’ve written it down. It is your software code. It’s written down somewhere. You can submit that to the trademark office and protect the code so that somebody else can’t just copy your code and do whatever

it is, the software does, with your code. Now, it doesn’t protect the idea or the concept of the software, okay? So it protects the actual physical code. If somebody said, I like that idea, I’m gonna go code my own, they can do that because what we’re protecting, remember, is the actual code itself and not the idea for the outcome of the software. But you could protect that if it were,

Angela (11:16.15)
otherwise registerable with a patent. So that’s copyright. So you can register a copyright for things like your website, videos, video courses, process manuals, like you created a PDF which is, details all of your processes or all of the roles that people have in your business and you’re selling that as part of your coaching program or you’re selling it separately, however you’re offering that.

you can protect that physical embodiment, like a PDF or something, by registering a copyright for that. As far as trademarks go, a lot of people will register their overarching brand, right? Like maybe your brand is investor fuel and you have a lot of other products that come under that umbrella brand. You may have, maybe you have a flip nerds course.

So maybe it’s branded investor fuel and also flip nerds, cause that’s the title of the course. So it can be the flip nerds course offered by investor fuel, right? So you can use more than one trademark on your goods or services. So we just need to ask ourselves what’s important to us, you know? So if I’m a trademark owner, I want to ask, okay, what would I be upset about somebody else ripping off?

And that’s the thing that you should register as a trademark. If you wouldn’t be upset if somebody else used it, then you don’t need to apply to register it. If you would be upset, then you should register it because it’s really hard to enforce unregistered trademarks. There’s a whole bunch of other stuff that you have to prove and it gets really expensive litigating those claims.

Mike Hambright (12:43.805)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (13:04.102)
And even if you have a trademark though, you can license that to other people. Like they could, you could license their usage of it, right? I mean, if you have, clearly if you were a franchise system or, but even if you’re not, if you wanted to own something that had value, you could give people the right to use that and you could limit their use on how they use it as well, right?

Angela (13:07.694)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Angela (13:15.288)
Mm-hmm.

Angela (13:19.692)
Yeah, of course. So think of a trademark as like a bundle of sticks. And you can take out some of those sticks and give them to other people. So some of the trademark sticks are the right to exclusive use, the right to exclude others from use, the right to enforce your exclusive use. So there’s some sticks there. And you can give people the you have permission to use it stick.

Okay, so you can give them that stick while retaining all the other sticks, right? So you can say, I have the exclusive use, but here’s the permission stick. So I’m going to give you, the permission stick from my bundle and, you know, pursue it to our licensing agreement. I may be able to take it back at a later time. I may say, here’s the stick, but I’m only lending it to you for a year. Or here’s the stick.

But there are some conditions applied to the stick. And if you abuse those conditions, I’m taking the stick back. So, yeah.

Mike Hambright (14:25.959)
Right, right, right, yeah. So let’s talk about a couple things here that are, if people are…

If they have a brand or they’re just starting a new brand, one of the things that there’s a couple of things that were interesting to me because when we had somebody infringing on our brand, I started to like understand this a little bit more because of course I got pulled into it for the first time. Right. I’m like, OK, what do we what do we have here? What are we dealing with? So a couple of things that were interesting to me is different classes. There’s different classes that you’re trademarked for. Right. I think a lot of people just assume, well, I have this thing trademarked, but it’s you have that name or emblem probably trademarked for specific classes and not for others. So somebody could

Angela (14:43.15)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (15:01.987)
use that brand in a different context, right?

Angela (15:05.134)
Yeah, so people tend to think that, just briefly, the Trademark Office has divided the entire universe of goods and services up into 45 different classes. They call them international classes. For example, things like coaching and teaching and training are going to be in class 41. Things like clothing are going to be in class 25. If you have an online store, that’s going to be in class 35, and on and on.

look too much at the classes and they’re forgetting about something called related goods. So even if something is in a different class, like say for example, you have real estate services, Mike, in class 36, okay? So real estate brokerage services are in class 36. That does not mean that somebody can take your trademark and start offering courses in class 41.

But Angela, it’s a different class. Well, that doesn’t matter because class 41 teaching and coaching and training and class 36 real estate brokerage services are considered related goods. I’ll put air quotes around that, okay, related goods. Why are they related? Because it’s normal in the marketplace to see people offering real estate brokerage services and also using that same brand.

offering things like teaching and coaching and training. So when the consumer is used to seeing product or service A used in conjunction with product and service B and they tend to have the same trademark, even though they’re in different classes, we call them related goods. So when they’re related, your trademark extends to that class, even if

you don’t have a registration that covers that class. Now, it’s good to have a registration that covers all the classes. Why? Because it makes enforcement easier. And anything that makes enforcement easier means that enforcement is cheaper. Okay? So if you’re using it in two classes, it’s worth it to register it in both of those classes, register the trademark in both classes because it makes enforcement easier. You can hold up the trademark

Mike Hambright (17:27.583)
Sure.

Angela (17:29.324)
registration, they’re electronic now, but you can get a paper one if you like, and say, look, these goods and services are listed on my trademark application. Therefore, I have rights. You don’t have rights. Please respect my rights and cease and desist your use of my trademark. It’s just a lot, there’s a lot more teeth to that when we can actually point to the certificate and say, these are my rights.

Mike Hambright (17:48.179)
Yep.

Mike Hambright (17:55.229)
Yeah, yeah, I know. I was going to give you an example of you had trademarked the phrase freedom fuel for me because we had something going on with freedom fuel. But there were people that had it in another space. It was like energy. was some sort of energy creation, something totally different. So they had it for that class and we had it for our class. Same phrase, totally different use cases, different classes all together.

Angela (18:11.394)
Yeah, totally different.

Angela (18:19.67)
Yeah, and that actually happens a lot. Think about this. Dove chocolate and dove soap. If you go look at those two trademarks, they’re both symbol trademarks, design trademarks, they look almost exactly alike. Why isn’t that an infringement? Well, because it’s not common in the marketplace to see the same people making soap and chocolate. That’d be kind of weird, right? So we don’t care about those. The consumer is not likely to be confused.

Mike Hambright (18:42.908)
Yeah.

Angela (18:48.556)
by those two trademarks. No consumer is gonna say, gosh, here’s Dove soap. I wonder if they make chocolate too. This just never happens, right? No.

Mike Hambright (18:56.881)
Alright. Doesn’t seem like it’s the same, yeah.

Yeah, so the other thing is that was interesting to me is if your phrase is kind of vague, if it’s like a common phrase that is used, that’s hard to get. Like you couldn’t go get a trademark on the phrase home buyer, right? Because those are, I don’t know what the legal words for that are, but it’s just too common and too, you use so much that it would impact too many people or something like that, right?

Angela (19:09.934)
Hmm.

Angela (19:16.333)
No.

Angela (19:27.619)
we don’t really describe it like that. the-

Mike Hambright (19:30.493)
Yeah, well, I’m not an attorney. I’m saying it. Yeah. Let me ask my attorney how to explain it, everyone. Go ahead.

Angela (19:33.41)
Yeah, so, okay, so here’s what I would say. There are really two issues here. One is we don’t really call it a common phrase. We either say that it’s descriptive for the goods and services. So if you’re offering home buyer services, if you’re a realtor and you want to get a trademark for home buyer and what you do is you help home buyers, we’re not gonna be able to register that. Why?

because it’s merely descriptive, it may be even generic, for the goods and services that you’re offering and that you’re seeking to register the trademark for. So a trademark is, we call it merely descriptive, again with the air quotes, we call it merely descriptive when it describes the trademark proposed, describes the goods.

the end user of the goods, some essential quality of the goods. So here, the essential quality of the services too. The services is that you help home buyers. Well then that’s descriptive for home buyers, right? If what you wanted to register was home buyers, that would be a no go. And then there’s this other issue of failing to function as a trademark. And that could be for words and phrases that are just

commonly used, like let’s say that you wanted to register a trademark for the acronym FAFO. Okay. We all know what that means. I’m not going to say it because it’s naughty. Fool around and find out. Okay. That’s what I’ll say. We’ll just change it. So fool around and find out. If you wanted to register a trademark for something like fool around and find out.

Mike Hambright (21:12.937)
Something like that, yeah.

Angela (21:23.896)
People don’t identify that as a trademark. So if it’s a phrase that is so commonly used that it wouldn’t be perceived as a trademark, then we say it fails to function as a trademark. So the failure to function issue is kind of tangentially related to the merely descriptive issue in that

it doesn’t function, like both of them don’t function, but there’s slightly different nuanced reasons. So common phrases and words, people are like, you can’t register a trademark for a common word, but we do that all the time. Apple, okay? Apple is a trademark, but it’s not for apples. It’s for computers and computer peripherals and cell phones. Orange, people have, you know, we have…

Mike Hambright (22:10.803)
Yeah.

Angela (22:21.866)
orange for both banking and for guitar amplifiers. Okay, so sometimes we can register common words as trademarks, but they have to be unrelated to the goods and services that are being offered. You’re not gonna be able to register orange if what you do is sell oranges. Okay, we can’t do that, but we can register it for guitar amplifiers or banking services.

Mike Hambright (22:48.691)
Yep, yep. One thing that’s interesting to me is we both know someone that had a fairly massive lawsuit by somebody using their name. They’re like Mike Hambright, right? So you can trademark your name, which I had never really thought about that until it happened to somebody. if you had somebody disparaging your name in the marketplace, you can actually protect yourself through trademark law instead of just being like, you know.

I don’t want you to use my name, don’t call me that or whatever. Like you can legally protect, tell us a little bit about that.

Angela (23:19.69)
Yeah, so what you can do is you can register your name for things like online information, websites, what else? Coaching, teaching, training. So then if somebody starts using your trademark on a website about, let’s just say you wanted to register a trademark for a website about real estate or a website about flipping houses, we’d call that real estate too.

So let’s just say that you registered your name for providing information on the web about real estate or real estate investment. No one else now can use your name in conjunction with those goods and services. So let’s say you’re really famous for your name, you’re Tony Robbins, okay? We’ll use Tony Robbins. Tony Robbins creates a ton of information. He has a ton of websites.

about, you know, offering courses in teaching and training and also offering probably information about self-improvement and health and wellness. So he can register his name and he has for providing online information about health and wellness and self-improvement. So what happens when somebody puts up a website about Tony Robbins and his offerings about health and wellness and self-improvement?

and they say unflattering things. Well, now they violated his trademark rights. So he has recourse to federal trademark litigation for that. And it doesn’t matter if they’re saying good things or bad things. You can also sue them for defamation, sure. But there’s a lot more teeth in the trademark statutes than there really is in the defamation statutes.

The defamation statutes are usually state law, so you have to sue in every state to get relief. Whereas if you want the website taken down, you can go into federal court with your trademark certificate and say, look, they are using my federally registered trademark. Please, judge, make them stop, give me damages, whatever.

Angela (25:44.718)
that judge can have the entire website, wherever it is, pulled down because they’re violating your nationwide trademark rights. So you get into court, you don’t have to go sue in every state for defamation. You get into federal court and you get relief in every state in the union because you had a registered, a federally registered trademark. That doesn’t work if your trademark is only in certain states. Then you have to go to state court.

You’ve got to sue in every state. It’s much better to register the trademark federally and then you go once and you get relief.

Mike Hambright (26:22.249)
Yeah, yeah, that’s awesome. Good stuff. So let’s talk about using. A lot of people think that they have a trademark and they can’t get it taken away. But if you’re not, proverbially, if you’re not using it, you could lose it, right? We actually did that. We had somebody had taken away from somebody for one of my trademarks now.

Angela (26:37.26)
Yeah, you do.

Mike Hambright (26:42.025)
This was my wife did it before we hired you and she just figured it out. But it was interesting to me that we had it taken away from somebody that they didn’t have it used anywhere. We couldn’t find any use case and I don’t know what happened on the back end if they just gave up or what, but.

Angela (26:51.704)
Yeah.

Angela (26:55.458)
Well, sometimes what happens is people get trademarks and then they stop using them. So even though they renewed the trademark, then so they renewed the trademark and then something happened. They stopped using it for whatever reason. Then you can go in and file what’s called a trademark cancellation proceeding. So you basically go in and say, hey, these people have stopped using their trademark. And if they don’t answer,

It’s like a mini lawsuit, but it doesn’t happen in federal court. It happens someplace called the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, which is basically an administrative body that adjudicates trademark disputes in certain circumstances, not all circumstances. So if what you’re trying to do involves canceling a trademark or opposing a proposed trademark,

Mike Hambright (27:26.441)
Yeah.

Angela (27:49.518)
You would do that at the trademark trial and appeal board. It’s not for litigating trademark lawsuits such as those that belong in federal court. It’s kind of weird. But anyway, you could go in and you could say, these people are no longer using their trademark, please cancel it. And there’s an opportunity for the trademark owner to respond and say, no, we’re still using it. If they’ve really stopped though,

they’re probably not going to bother to respond because it costs money to respond because you have to hire an attorney to do that. I mean, you don’t have to, but you’re not going to know what’s going on unless you do. So if the person doesn’t respond, then eventually the trademark trial and appeal board says, OK, we gave you an opportunity to respond. You didn’t. And so the person who wants to invalidate your trademark wins.

Mike Hambright (28:39.369)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (28:43.975)
Yeah, Cool. So let’s talk about the impact of AI on… Let’s wrap. One more question on that is like, just basically is the… To clarify here for… If folks, if you have a trademark that’s important to you, make sure you’re actively using it and protecting it. And if you get something in the mail that says, you know, this is being protested or whatever, make sure you reply if it’s important to you,

Angela (28:49.26)
Mmm. Yeah.

Angela (28:59.843)
Yeah.

Angela (29:06.19)
Yeah, so when you get a trademark, oftentimes if you use an attorney, the attorney will dock at the renewal date. So trademarks are renewable at year five and year 10 and then every 10 years thereafter. So if you want to maintain the trademark registration, you need to renew at year five and then renew again at year 10.

it’s a good idea if you have a trademark to note that in your calendar, even if it’s way off in the future. You can use Google Calendar and set some type of deadline at whatever day, and then it will remind you. if you’re not working with an attorney, it’s really important to keep track of those deadlines because once the trademark dies, you can’t revive it.

Mike Hambright (29:43.186)
ask here.

Angela (29:59.146)
Okay, you can file the renewal documents late by paying a fee, but if the trademark is canceled for non-renewal, then you have to go file a new trademark application. In the meantime, somebody else may have filed a trademark application asking to use your mark or something similar. And now…

You have to prove that you were still using it all along and you just forgot to file the renewal documents. I have one client who’s in that situation, didn’t file the renewal documents and now we’re having to oppose the trademark application of somebody who applied after his trademark expired. Even though he was still using it the entire time.

Mike Hambright (30:43.645)
Mmm, yep.

Wow, Okay. So let’s talk about AI and the impact on protecting your trademarks because people are using AI to write all kinds of things, create all kinds of things. Maybe it’s embedded inside of some of the AI that’s out there to not infringe on other people’s brands. I don’t know that’s even possible, but who knows. But what is the impact on AI and where do you see that going?

Angela (30:57.603)
Yeah.

Angela (31:09.688)
Well, really that’s a copyright question because remember people are using AI to create content. So there’s this question out there, if I create content using AI, who owns the copyright? And it’s one of those weird questions now. It’s kind of an it depends thing. So the copyright law gives rights to authors. So everybody who creates is called an author.

and whatever they create is called the work. In order to have trademark rights, the author has to be human, okay? And the work has to be original. So now, where are the boundaries of that? If I create something and I use AI to help me create it,

where how much can be AI created and still be considered to have a human author. Because remember, authors have to be human under the copyright law. So you can’t have animals. There was actually a case about this that went all the way to the Supreme Court. There was a nature photographer, and he was out, and he set up a camera on a tripod. And a monkey came along.

snapped a photo of himself. The monkey snapped a photo. I call it the monkey selfie case, but it really happened. And Peta, the people for ethical treatment of animals, sued the photographer saying that the monkey, since the monkey snapped the photo of himself, that the monkey owned the copyright for that photo. And the Supreme said, no, no. Copyright assumes a human author.

Mike Hambright (32:36.029)
Hahaha

Angela (33:01.224)
Animals cannot create copyrightable works. These are not works of authorship that are covered by the copyright code. So who owns the copyright to that monkey selfie? Nobody. Why? Because the photographer didn’t snap the shutter, so he didn’t create it. He’s not the author. And the monkey, not being human, cannot be an author under the copyright law. So nobody owns it. There’s no copyright.

Mike Hambright (33:25.097)
Yeah. Wow. Eventually the monkeys take over though, remember that? That’s another story, but yeah.

Angela (33:32.366)
That sounds like some dystopian film or something, Oh yeah, Planet of the Apes, no, no, no. Well, sorry, unless the rules are different on Planet of the Apes, there is no copyright ownership given to the apes.

Mike Hambright (33:35.433)
Planet of the Apes, that’s what I’m talking about. yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike Hambright (33:43.288)
Yeah

Mike Hambright (33:50.791)
Until they take over. Yeah. That’s right. So Angela, hey folks want to learn more about you, your services and things like that. I you’re great at answering questions and of course, super helpful. It kind of.

Angela (33:52.384)
until they take over and write their own copyright law, right?

Mike Hambright (34:07.259)
One of the things that you said was super valuable to me is like I’m always worried about when is my trade, when does this trademark end? And sometimes I message you and you’re like, no, here’s the date. Like it ends then I’ve got it in my calendar. I’m going to let you know what to do. Right. And so you’re kind of protecting us there. But if folks want to learn more about you or connect, like where should they go?

Angela (34:24.652)
Well, I do have over 600 videos about trademarks and copyrights on YouTube. You can just go to search at Trademark Doctor on YouTube and you’ll find me there. I’m also on Facebook at Facebook.com forward slash Trademark Doctor. And you can find me online at TrademarkDoctor.net. If you want to reach out to me, there is a contact page where you can book a time to talk with me for 15 minutes if you have.

Mike Hambright (34:29.427)
Wow.

Angela (34:53.932)
trademark questions, burning trademark questions that you want answered, you can schedule with me there. Yeah, so. Yeah, if you have trademark questions, it’s so inexpensive, it’s 25 bucks to talk to me for 15 minutes, and I can answer so many questions in 15 minutes. So yeah, I answer people’s questions all the time.

Mike Hambright (35:01.695)
And it’s better if you’re proactive versus reactive, right?

Angela (35:21.227)
And sometimes they’ll send me a question and I’ll go, wow, that’s a really good question. I should probably do a video about that.

Mike Hambright (35:29.247)
Yeah, awesome. Well, we’ll put the links down below for those that want to go learn more about Angela and her services, or possibly talk to her. So, well, Angela, thanks so much for joining me today. Great to see you.

Angela (35:34.648)
Sure.

Angela (35:41.42)
Thanks, Mike. It’s always nice to talk with you.

Mike Hambright (35:43.647)
Yeah, good stuff. Guys, as entrepreneurs, we work hard to kind of build these brands. And sometimes we take it for granted that nobody’s going to mess with your stuff. But I can tell you, from personal experience, it actually is just a matter of time before it does happen, especially if you’ve worked unusually hard and basically put a bullseye on your back, folks might come after you. So make sure you’re protecting your assets and your intellectual property for sure. So I hope you got some great insights from today. Thanks again, Angela.

Everybody have a great day. We’ll see you on the next show.

Angela (36:15.31)
Thanks, Mike.