Podcasts are the new radio. Whether you’re telling chilling stories of true crime or discussing your favorite TV show, podcasts are a fertile ground for creating content and building an audience. That’s why it can be so disheartening if someone else rips off your podcast and starts to take your audience with them.
Fortunately, you can take steps to protect your podcast so that it stays truly unique: mainly applications for registered trademarks and copyrights.
How Trademarks Can Protect Your Podcast
Your podcast has its own unique brand. You spent days or even weeks coming up with the perfect podcast name, hired graphic designers or created your own graphics for the logo and episode covers, and you may have even created your own promotional material. Those brand elements are what helps your listeners find your podcast so that they can catch up on all the new episodes. And most of those elements are trademarks.
The main priority will be to trademark the name of your podcast. It’s a good idea to put in an application to register that trademark before your podcast even launches, so that there’s no risk of someone else beating you to the punch. If you have a logo, a slogan, or any other key branding elements, register trademarks for those as well.
How Copyrights Can Help Your Podcast
Copyrights protect your rights to any created works of art — and podcasts count as works of art. Content creation is a creative endeavor that you labored on, finding the right guests, researching, recording, and editing before releasing it to your audience. Your audience may even have favorite episodes that really build your popularity. This is exactly why you should copyright those podcast episodes.
When you copyright a podcast episode, it doesn’t mean that no other podcast can cover that subject material. It does, however, mean that they cannot plagiarize you — repeating your exact words without credit or playing any recording from your podcast without your permission. They may even owe you royalties for playing audio from your podcast, in the same way that musicians are owed royalties for their music being used.
How Garcia-Zamor Can Help You Most of All
If the prospect of applying for trademark and patent applications seems overwhelming, don’t worry! The good news is your intellectual property legal team at Garcia-Zamor can handle it all for you. As you grow your audience and continue to create content, protecting your hard work will become increasingly important to prevent plagiarism. We have over two decades of experience with IP law. We will research current trademarks and copyrights, fill out your applications, even cover the application fees and keep you posted on the progress of your application.
But our help doesn’t stop there. We can help you take action if anyone infringes on your podcast IP. We’ll send out cease and desist letters, advise you on the next steps, and we can handle any infringement litigation. With our Tradeguard services, we can even perform regular trademark searches to make sure no one is using your trademark without your permission. Want Garcia-Zamor to help you with your trademark and copyright applications to protect your podcast? Contact us today to learn more or to schedule a consultation.
