Thank you for your response and thanks for checking the service out. It may be prohibitive for many people who do rely on a personal email account rather than a secondary one.
I would suggest you set up a throwaway yahoo email and email the site. I understand it may be confusing but all discussion happens through email and the focus shouldn't be the homepage. We can demo thru email once you set up a throwaway account. In addition, you can use the throwaway email to actually use the site if you have an aversion to using your personal email.
There is still a ton of information that you could provide to the new users visiting your home page. It is your job to convince the users to send that first email. Suggesting that people create throw away email accounts does not sound like the best user on-boarding process. This is where examples, or better descriptions on your home page would help.
I dunno...seems succinct enough: pick a topic, send us an email, and we forward emails to you from emailers discussing same topic. I only suggested creating a throwaway because people worry about spam.
It is likely...but we don't want to weed emails in order to preserve the experience. You're still gonna get a lot of insightful discussion. But unfortunately, spam would come with the territory.
Understandable. Wouldn't that mean that spam will roll very quickly to many email accounts? Wouldn't spam engines start picking up application emails as spam emails(assuming once some discussion goes rogue with spammers the email receivers mark the conversation as spam)? Or am i missing something here.
Thanks for your response. Just select from those email address that hold potential for interesting discussion and communicate with them directly. Forwarding enables you to pick and choose from people dropping in to comment on the topic.
Cool. It does bring a new way of discussion to the table. But was wondering what would normally be an users behaviour? You could selectively reply to it, mute it or mark it as spam. Any trends data you got so far to throw light on this?
Honestly, only a couple people have emailed in so I can't offer you anything concrete. The goal is for users to reply to the forwards so that anyone involved in the topic is updated.
Is the paperwork involved laborious? I ask this because I think it would be interesting to streamline the process and create a marketplace where conceivably tens or hundreds or more people could 'own' a copyright and/or trademark, grant licenses and divvy the profits among themselves whenever the license is evoked
As I said in the GP, under the Berne Convention, copyright exists in a work when it is created. There is no paperwork required. For example, thousands of people hold copyright to portions of Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation makes the license, and the terms under which contributions are accepted, clear, and that's it.
But if you want to be dividing up money, then you'll need to carefully consider the issues of whether the licensing terms would hold up in courts in various jurisdictions, how to prove at a later date that authors did indeed agree to the license terms, and how the licensing terms might be changed, if necessary, without all authors needing to be contacted individually. For that, you need to talk to a real lawyer (which, once again, I am not).
And then there is the issue of just how you're going to collect money and get it to all those people ....
I am a lawyer, and what ggchappell said is correct.
The work required to license either isn't difficult. Arguing back and forth on terms is how the legal bills add up. It all boils down to how much money must be paid.
Your product is mostly the underlying asset, not the streamlined process.
Remember, every licensee of the copyright or trademark will be selling the same thing (mostly). How do they differentiate themselves in the market? Probably price, in a multitude of ways.
I just filed for a trademark. It took about an hour to do on the patent trademark office's site. It costs about 300 per class of trademarks. The owner of the trademark is listed as the LLC, not me individually.
Yes, copyright and TM are different, but both can be handled similarly. Let's start with similarities.
You can register both individually, and then execute a licensing contract for each afterward. You sign and the new party signs. Terms of the agreement ae mostly up to both of you.
Trademarks allow for extra assignment recording rights. You can check the USPTO website for those or contact an attorney for specifics.
Basically, you creat a license, like GPL or a CC license or a custom one (how most are done).
You can charge a flat fee, ongoing royalties, or other. Whatever fits your goals and the market.
