PODCASTEpisode 34 – Intellectual Property Rights at Death: Copyrights (Part 3 of 3)
Unlike a patent or a trademark, a copyright requires no application, no filing fee, and no proof of use in commerce. It exists the moment a work is set down in tangible form–which makes it one of the easiest assets to create, and one of the easiest to overlook in an estate plan.
In this episode of Into the Woods–the final installment of a three-part series on intellectual property rights at death–attorney Trent Bolar joins host Dave Shaffer to close the loop with copyrights. They explain what copyright protects, from music and literature to paintings, plays, and blueprints, and what it does not protect, including facts and the news itself. Dave and Trent then walk through the rules that determine how long protection lasts and when a work enters the public domain: the life of the creator plus 70 years for works created after 1978, the last surviving creator plus 70 for collaborative works, and the pre-1923 cutoff that has brought classic characters into the public space, including the earliest version of Mickey Mouse from Steamboat Willie, the original Popeye, and the first Winnie the Pooh. The episode closes with an extended show-and-tell segment on the AI training lawsuits now working their way through the courts, the Tupac estate’s protection of his catalog, name, image, and likeness, and a tribute to Dolly Parton–whose decision to own her publishing outright is a lesson in what careful planning can do for an estate.