Protecting your intellectual property
Wednesday, March 24th, 2010An interesting question came in from J.R. regarding whether to share intellectual property with a client. Since some of my readers (both of you) are also consultants, I thought you might be interested in this email exchange. J.R.’s question is first, then my answer:
A client who was impressed with my presentation two weeks ago just asked for copies of my slides. I am torn about whether to send them or not.
After all, this material was custom developed for this client from scratch, and took scores of hours to produce. It is my intellectual property. At the time, the head honcho mentioned the possibility of bringing me in for additional gigs for their offices on the West Coast, but it now looks as if they might try to reproduce my presentation on their own.
On the other hand, maybe he wants to share the material with his higher ups as a way to convince them to bring me back in., or keep them on hand to show people who might become my clients in the future, and I’m just being paranoid.
What advice would you give me in this situation? Thanks so much.
J.R.
My answer:
I guess the first thing to do is to ask him why he’d like it.
The next thing to do would be to indicate to him that you would like to have additional business from him, and you would like him not to use this on his own. You can ask him to sign something that they won’t use it for presentations or will pay an additional fee if they do.
You can also prepare it with a watermark that allows people to see what it is but indicates it’s not for presentations. Sometimes you see this on photos on eBay and such. Then they can see it but not use it, although I suppose they could recreate text from it.
Or, frankly, I look at it this way…. once the client pays me for my work, it belongs to them. It’s a thought.
Hope that helps.
Kathy Wertheim
If you have questions about being a professional speaker or about fundraising, please write me, Katherine Wertheim, CFRE, at katherine@werth-it.com.