Protect Your Great Ideas For Free

Aimed at businesses that thrive on idea capital, this primer on intellectual property law spells out the easy and important steps to take to protect ideas such as brands, recipes, inventions, or artwork. In an increasingly competitive business world, companies live or die by the freshness and power of their ideas; protecting these works is not complicated and can cost nothing if entrepreneurs take action early, from realizing what intellectual capital their business might have to considering patents and licenses. The time and costs involved with each option are detailed, and the book explains all of the new choices and opportunities—as well as a few pitfalls—open to owners of protected ideas. For further study and action, there is a companion website accessible by a password provided in the book that offers sample legal agreements and links to other resources.

How to find the soft innovation that will make your product, service, school, church, or career worth talking about. We live in an era of too much noise, too much clutter, too many choices, and too much spam. And as Seth Godin's 200,000-copy bestseller Purple Cow taught the business world, the old ways of marketing simply don't work anymore. The best way to sell anything these days is through word of mouth and the only real way to get word of mouth is to create something remarkable. Free Prize Inside, the sequel to Purple Cow, explains how to do just that. It's jammed with practical ideas you can use right now to make your product or service remarkable, so that it will virtually sell itself. Remember when cereal came with a free prize inside? Even if you already liked the cereal, it was the little plastic toy that made it irresistible. Godin explains how you can think of a bonus that will make your customers feel just as excited, no matter what business you're in. Consider these free prizes: • The Tupperware party, which turned buying plastic bowls into a social event • Flintstones vitamins, which turned a serious product into something fun • The free change-counting machine at every Commerce Bank branch • The little blue box from Tiffany, which makes people happy before they even open it This book offers a way to create free prizes quickly, cheaply, and reliably and persuade others in your organization to help you bring them to life.

A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties. In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. And it's that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope--haunted houses, erotica, bildungsroman--in which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations about the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships. Machado's dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, Star Trek and Disney villains, fairy tales, as well as iconic works of film and fiction. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.

Everybody wants to think of a great idea that will make them rich. A good indication that you have a great idea is that someone copies it, but by then it can be too late. This is too bad as a lot of the knowhow to protect your ideas is free but buried in a mass of detail and exceptions which most people put in the "too hard" basket. Some IP protection you must pay for, such as trademarks but it is well worth it, provided it is done properly