Irony... And intellectual property

Today, I am going to teach you all a lesson on Irony... And Intellectual Property.

I was at work yesterday scanning a pile of documents into the computer to upload them to their online document database. The documents happened to be all Intellectual Property documents, meaning copyrights, trademarks, patents, etc. (But mostly copyrights). The sister company to Super Book Deals, called Trader’s Library, publishes works on stock trading. The documents I was scanning were all deals made with authors and companies about works to be published, and were about who had the rights to said works.

I noticed some interesting things when I was reading through these documents. The international documents were fascinating to me, although probably extensively boring to the average eyes. The most fascinating documents were the publishing contracts, which brings me to my second lesson for you.

Lesson #2, When you can’t find product, make product.

The start of the publishing company came about when the company was just buying and selling books geared towards stock traders. The traders were asking about topics that just weren’t published anywhere. The company then saw an opportunity. If you can’t find the product, make the product. They started publishing books, of course, but this is not the most fascinating part. The company holds events, which are also geared towards stock traders. They invite traders to come and listen to talks by experts. The company files all of these copyright documents because the speakers sign over the rights to the recordings of their sessions, which are sold on DVD after the conference. In the end they make more on the DVDs than they do on the seminars!

Lesson is: When you see a niche that needs to be filled, fill it with your own product or service, than come up with unique ways to market it. The point of the events is not to gain publicity, it’s to have people speak and sell their speeches.

Of course, after scanning all of the documents into the computer, I went to class and we talked for three hours about Intellectual Property. So...

Lesson #3, pay attention in life, you might learn something in class.