Legal Strategies for Businesses and Creatives

Catalog description

Artists, individuals, and businesses in the creative industries today have greater means than ever before to develop and grow a successful operation in the marketplace. Key to this success, however, is a strategic combining of artistic and creative talents with knowledge of marketplace elements, particularly those pertaining to business legal matters. This course introduces individuals to foundations of marketplace thinking as a means for assessing the needs of their given operational model and teaches the essential legal topics necessary for maximizing the opportunities that a given industry and operational model offers. Typical topics include business entity choice and formation, intellectual property identification and protection, and contract matters such as agreements made with other businesses, employee and independent contractor agreements, commissioned work, and user licensing. Students in the course will have the opportunity to apply the course topics to their individual areas of interest and creativity, as well as to work together so as to develop a comparative understanding of the course material’s application in different creative fields. As a final project, individuals in the class will develop their own individualized “legal studio”—a business legal plan that is strategically designed and integrated into the practices of their creative operation to further drive the operation’s success.