It’s your work. Protect it.
Your brand, your network, your intellectual property. As AI makes everything else easy to copy, these are your edge, and the easiest thing to lose.
Some of the sharpest builders I know think protecting your IP is a waste of time. They’re dead wrong, and it’s going to cost them.
Here’s what they’re missing. In the age of AI, almost everything gets cheaper to produce. What doesn’t is the stuff you can’t fake: your brand, your network, and the intellectual property you built on the back of years of real work. Proprietary data. Original research. The numbers nobody else has. Everything else is going the way of the buffalo.
IP you don’t defend isn’t yours.
Big brands have known this forever. They monitor, they protect, they enforce. Not because they’re litigious. Because an asset you won’t defend stops being an asset. No enforcement mechanism, and you’re neutered. You’ve got the thing and no way to keep it.
So we built the mechanism.
Agents and alerts watch the web for our name, our domain, our data, any variation of it. When someone uses our work, the whole team sees it, not just me. Every hit gets cataloged and timestamped, so we know the scale and the timing, not just the vibe.
Then the boring step nobody takes. You file for the rights that give you standing to act. Sixty-five bucks, about forty-five minutes on a government site that feels like it was built in 2003. Tedious. Skippable. It’s also the line between being annoyed and being able to do something about it.
Recently the system flagged two more commercial publishers running our data, our co-buying numbers straight out of our national report, with no credit and no link. A year ago they’d have slipped past me for months. Now I catch them the same day, with the evidence and the standing to act already in hand.
Everyone has rights. Almost no one has recourse.
Taking someone’s work, rebranding it, and selling it for profit doesn’t get settled with a link.
I run the same play for press. Catch it, keep the proof, so the page can die but the record doesn’t.
Most companies have neither the rights nor the recourse. They can’t find their own work, let alone prove it was theirs first.
In an age where the task is cheap, the work you can defend is what’s left worth owning. Build the thing that defends it.
The system behind it: IP protection engine.