IP, "Tools" and Intellectual Overload

A boy puts up his hand in class and asks,

"Mr. Osborne. May I be excused? My brain is full."
(Gary Larson, from
The Far Side 2007 Page-a-day Calendar)
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Intellectual overload

I wish this header meant we'd talk about what it's like to be too smart. That honour I shall reserve for someone who could lead that discussion from experience ~;->

I mean somewhat the opposite: the way our brains become less efficient at processing information when they're receiving too many messages at once.

Look at the photo here. It's my dining room table a few weeks back, around 2:30 in the afternoon.

Now, what's the first thing you feel when you see it? Does the techno-salad make you energetic? Anxious? Indifferent? And, what about the papers lining the frame? You might be wondering why one would need so many different media at once.

Looking at the photo, and writing about it, I admit to feeling a bit anxious. And it's my office. Being a consultant gives me greater ability to control my space. But I'm still a creature of the culture within which I work. So here are all the "tools" that I refer to daily - for most, hourly - to conduct my business.

Here's an example. On a typical day, I'll go to my daytimer (bottom-left corner) to mark a date, after reading an e-mail in the laptop (opposite corner)where someone had asked whether I could send a document in .PDF format (using same laptop) on the day I'm now marking down. Underneath the deadline note, I'm adding a reminder to install the new PDF conversion software beforehand. That is how I will meet my client's expectations.

In this action alone, I've had to use two separate media from the spread in the photo, and think about three (including the software decision and follow-up plan). And this kind of processing happens repeatedly, as I navigate how I'm going to use time to please my customers and keep making money.

If you're reading this, you too are likely part of a culture one where we need to be reachable frome several places simultaneously. And, it's expected that we will process information in several formats quickly.

And - if you're in many businesses, including mine - many clients will expect you to deliver high-quality information, quickly.

And then there are all those less-sexy thoughts that enter our minds while we're using all the tools to work in warp speed.

Like the meeting with your son's teacher and why he's been coming home so tired the past few days; or the pile of cat vomit next to the litterbox, both of which need to be cleaned; or whether you remembered to pay your VISA bill - and did you pay the "after due date" amount when you didn't need to?!

I've left kiddieland, dear reader. This is a new discussion I'm excited about, because I find it compelling. And, I suspect that if you're still here, then you do, too.

But, it is Monday, so let's not barrage ourselves with too much more on this...Post a comment, or come back soon to hear more about this topic that's burning my (info-addled) brain.

Let's also continue the discussion about Intellectual Property (IP). And you can win something!

Question of the week: strictly speaking, was it stealing to publish that photo of the Dora chocolate last week? Lemmeknow what you think by posting your comment below through the Comments link. I'll be collecting comments and drawing a commenter's name at the end of May - the winner will receive a Best Buy gift certificate worth $25.

More 'o' Dora...and discussion of intellectual property

Ok, I'll try to make this my last one on this topic, despite how easy quarry poor Dora and her ilk are!

Last week I took my own picture of a Dora chocolate. Since then, I've been wondering if my post violates their trademark. I DID take it myself, and could say that someone took it not knowing about the trademark notice engraved into her back (after all, my hub did eat that part before I took the photo). BUT, I did then go on to make much of that engraving in my post. Hmmm...

On one hand, people post photos of the Dora character in the thousands; eBay alone likely has about 100 different photos people have taken of the huge range of no-longer-loved (or never-opened) Dora toys available. Are they violating copyright or trademark? Strictly speaking, probably, because they're reproducing the image for their own gain.

When I wrote my first missive on what has become the "Dora series," I Googled for Dora images, thinking I'd use one to liven things up. But then, I thought I'd be violating trademark / copyright law, and as a professional communicator that's against my ethics. But, am I any less guilty if I take my own photo? Where does trademark protection end?

For example, I used to work with someone who followed a strict sense of ethics in preserving the brand of the company we worked for, but would still copy images of other companies' logos from their Web sites for posting on our intranet. He didn't think this was an issue, likely since it boosted that other company's brand recognition. But he better than anyone knew that in many cases any alteration of the image's size or dimensions could water down or otherwise negatively represent their brand.

I've also been thinking of copyright for info that appears here in this blog. Does anyone out there know whether any blog posting can appear in future as an article in another medium? I'm assuming that, since this was clearly traceable back to me, the ideas belong to me.

But now that it's "out there," I know no-one can represent it as their own (yeah, like that's gonna happen anyway), do I have permission to do anything else with it? Say I wanted to develop a blog entry into a longer article, for instance.

If you're one of my two-point-five readers, and can shed any light on this, I'd like to hear about it. (And TIA!)

Branded holidays: chocolate Dora

I keep trying to get off this subject, but keep being given more fodder for my battle against the Brandish Invasion.

Th Easter holiday just came through our home, via chocolate confection and new spring clothes for our daughter, K. We observe Passover, too, and both holidays came during the same week this year.

The pictured chocolate Dora arrived via K's grandmother, my mom. You see it in it's partially-eaten form.

Everyone knows we can choose from many shapes molded from chocolate each year. Even when I was a kid, there were chocolate Bugs Bunnies, aside the more traditional, "generic" ones. Now, there's likely more selection between characters. I like to think there are still just as many kids who are just happy to have a huge piece of chocolate to devour, and therefore don't care that they don't recognize the bunny or chicken (not that it matters, since within seconds it will likely be missing an ear).

In explaining my current brand bugaboo, the photo doesn't do the job I'd hoped it would do - my husband ate the part I really wanted to photograph. This part was the back side of the chocolate Dora. Engraved into the back - before David at it! - were the year and trademark information for the Dora character. My daughter's Easter treat had quite literally been branded.

The proverbial (cash) cow for the nice folks at Nick Jr., even this rendering of the beloved Dora had to remind us that someone had created her. If we as humans did this, I'd be walking around with my mom's name and the year I was born carved into my back.

I would have liked to ask K if she'd noticed the letters and numbers on Dora's back. But then, she wasn't all that concerned about biting off Dora's feet straight away. So I think (and hope) the branding would have escaped her, too.

p.s. Apologies if this photo ends up dwarfing my post - first time adding one!

It's another step in this blog's evolution...I welcome your comments to turn this blog into a conversation you'll want to keep being part of!

Expert communications tools help Gore to forward his environmental campaign (repost from February 26, 2007, 11:18 am)

(Forgive me for reposting this week. Have got a lot of catch-up to do on other fronts...I hope it's still relevant to readers.)

On the morning after the Oscars, it makes sense to talk about some impressions I had about An Inconvenient Truth, now a multiple Oscar winner, including for Best Documentary.

Mr. Gore himself attended, even though, as far as I know, he was not instrumental in creating the film apart from starring in it. But they dragged him up onstage when Truth won. He even presented an award with Leo DiCaprio, where they yet again good-humouredly put Gore out as the guy who just can’t catch a break: after a few minutes of set-up by Leo, Gore began to deliver an “important announcement”, at which time the orchestra music swelled up behind him, drowning him out.

The film itself had started that set-up of Gore as the guy who won-but-then-(unfairly)-lost the last presidency. The interweaving of his unfortunate presidential history worked brilliantly to inspire empathy and open the ears of us viewers, so we’d more openly absorb the environmental message.

But it’s also the delivery of the message that struck me – essentially, the presentation part of the film was one of the most well-done PowerPoint presentations I’ve seen.

If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll recall that Gore stood onstage, dwarfed by the huge presentation that filled the wall behind him. The only words on it were labels – headings, titles of the X and Y axes on graphs, top-of-screen titles – while the rest was a series of images.

The images were often charts and graphs, which moved to demonstrate rising earth core temperatures, for example. Colour was used powerfully, too, with those rising red temperature lines contrasting with the more benign, powder blue ones alongside that indicated the desirable cool temps.

At other points, those relatively more clinical diagrams would be replaced by mammoth photos of forests burning and glaciers melting, with the vivid reality of the photos shocking the audience to full effect.

Then, just when a viewer might start to feel her eyes glazing over, the film would cut to the more “biographical” elements about Gore’s political life leading to the point in time of the film’s making. You see, and start to feel, the frustration of Gore and his supporters as they year after year tried to put the environment on the American political agenda. By the time we’re back to the presentation part, it’s hard not to completely turn yourself over to accepting Gore’s arguments.

Indeed, if the rock star treatment the media gave Gore during last week’s Toronto visit and during last night’s Oscars are any indication, this down-and-out crusader for the underdog – he campaigned for literacy during the Clinton presidency, too – has reinvented himself into a powerhouse of influence.

Regardless of which side of the environmental argument you find yourself on, you have to admit that Gore clearly knows how to use the communications vehicles available to him to his full advantage.

The Brandish Invasion - the saga continues

This past Saturday was my daughter's third birthday. Her grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins were all here. By the time they'd left, more than ten items bearing the image of Dora the Explorer had entered the building, along with a few of cohorts Winnie the Pooh (Disney version, natch), Pixar's Nemo and Thomas the Tank Engine.

I cannot write a long blog this week - too busy figuring out where all this stuff is going to go. Also, at the risk of sounding ungrateful, from here on in we'll be strategizing about how to influence the buying tendencies of our family so that our household is not so overwhelmed by the invasion of marketing in future.

(And for the environmental and anti-consumer movements - group I am beginning to identify with - this move will help cut down on the amount of new plastic and packaging that are created while these items are produced.) Garage sales and barter exchanges, here we come!

Anything to reduce the amount of physical and spiritual junk we end up having to manage, including the impact on our daughter. We want her to understand that life is about much more than recognizing your favourite cartoon characters on everything you own.