How to Protect Your Ideas, Brands, and Designs (Before Someone Steals Them With the Host Francis Onuk

Copyright is your creative shield.

It protects original artistic works, literary, visual and audio works.

If you illustrate a character, write a song, produce a podcast, copyright is what covers you.

And here's something most people don't know.

Copyright is automatic.

Yes.

You don't need to pay a lawyer or register with a government agency just for copyright to exist.

The very second your pen leaves the paper or your file is saved to your hard drive, you own that copyright.

You own the copyright to that original work.

But here's the catch.

Owning it automatically is one thing.

Proving you owned it first when a dispute breaks out is another completely different ballgame.

Right.

So how do you... get to create a digital paper trail.

This is going to help you.

So how do you prove? In case the computer says, oh, I had this idea first.

And it says, no, you stole from me.

You did not steal from me.

Yeah, three simple, very zero, zero, narrow habits you need to start today.

First, never, ever, ever, ever delete your raw working files.

Yes, I'm saying this for those who are designers and illustrators.

Don't ever delete your raw working files.

so that you can always have this original source file to always prove that you own this now the copycat can only have maybe a jpeg version a png version in a dispute you could just show how you made it it could be the color file photoshop file illustrator file just about what software you use to build it and it can be proven there then for those who don't have space please invest in cloud storage so you can save your files there rather than maybe putting this um solid or should i say physical um a physical hard drive or something put it into the cloud so never ever delete that for you i've seen this happen um one one great thing i usually used to do then as i now knew that it's a thing is that i email i email myself a simple copy of what I'm doing I email myself that file so that every time I go back to search on my email I will get to see that particular thing now okay now when you save always save and add the date so you're creating a new file you saved it as idea A and then you've worked on it rather than saving as idea A include idea A the 21st of August 2026 That also helps to show you when you actually created that file and when you actually did that.

So another thing again is when you're using hacked or should I say free, should I say legal software? Now it also gives that digital footprint.

But the thing is that you can prove that you used a legal software to do that.