Franchising is how a small brand becomes a scalable one — but it runs entirely on intellectual property. Here’s the plain-language guide to the trademark, trade secrets, copyright, and trade dress that make a concept franchisable, the FDD you legally can’t skip, and how the money and quality control actually work.
Licensing lets you keep your brand and get paid for it — someone else makes and sells, you collect royalties. Here’s the plain-language guide to what you can license, how the money works, the deal terms that matter, and how to protect your brand while another company uses it.
Selling your brand, content catalog, or trademarks? Here’s the plain-language playbook for how IP actually changes hands — what counts as a sellable asset, the paperwork that transfers it, why chain of title makes or breaks the deal, and the terms worth negotiating.
Someone registered a domain that copies your brand? Here’s the practical, step-by-step playbook for getting it back — from checking your trademark rights and gathering evidence to filing a UDRP complaint, what it costs, and what happens after you win.
You don’t really ‘own’ your domain name the way you own a chair — you hold a renewable registration. Here’s what that means, how trademarks can override your registration, what cybersquatting is, and how UDRP and the ACPA decide who keeps a contested domain.
Buying an NFT almost never buys you the copyright to the art — you get a token that points at it. Here’s the plain-language difference between owning the token, owning the artwork, and owning the copyright, and what minting actually does to your rights.
A game mod is legally a derivative work built on someone else’s game — so it lives or dies on the game’s license agreement, what assets you reuse, and whether you touch the copy protection. Here’s the plain-language line between the mod that ships and the mod that gets a takedown or a cease-and-desist.
Drawing your favorite character or writing a story in someone else’s world is technically infringement — but most of it survives because rights-holders tolerate it. Here’s the plain-language line between the fan work that gets left alone and the fan work that gets you a takedown, a cease-and-desist, or worse.
Every library you pull off GitHub or npm comes with strings attached. Here’s the plain-language compliance workflow indie developers can actually follow — how to check a license before you add a dependency, track your whole dependency tree, avoid the copyleft trap, and ship the attribution you legally owe.
Thinking about patenting your app? For most indie founders, a patent is the wrong tool — expensive, slow, and easy to design around, and a lot of software isn’t even patentable after the Alice ruling. Here’s a plain-language guide to what a software patent actually protects, the handful of situations where one makes real sense, what it costs, and the cheaper protections that cover almost everyone else.