Idaho and California startups should be aware of which types of contracts are essential to protect their intellectual property.
What Your Startup Needs to Know about Intellectual Property
7 things your startup business should know to protect your intellectual property and avoid litigation. To protect, prevent, contain, and obtain redress for your intellectual property – contact our law firm today!
When and how to protect your startup's intellectual property
What is intellectual property? Should you, as a founder, protect yours at your startup? We'll cover all things IP, including when—and when not—to protect it.
7 Startup Agreements That Save Companies (and Friendships) | Signus
Founder blowups and cap-table surprises are mostly preventable. A focused seven-document set—Founders Agreement, SAFE (Post-Money), Mutual NDA, Independent Contractor Agreement, Advisory Agreement, Consulting Agreement, and PIIA—closes the early gaps that orphan IP, muddle equity, and stall deals. Right-size what you send; use the subset that fits the moment. Clarity beats memory.
From ownership to stewardship: reimagining intellectual property governance through the Knowledge Commons Framework
Contemporary intellectual property (IP) governance remains strongly shaped by proprietary logics of exclusivity, control, and rights allocation, even as knowledge production becomes increasingly co...
How To Protect Your Intellectual Property Across Borders
Protect Your Intellectual Property with strong IP rights. Safeguard patents, trademarks, designs, and trade secrets to stay competitive in global markets.
The intellectual property rights imperative of single-vendor open source
I guess everybody knows it but nobody ever named it, as far as I know, so I’m doing it here: The Intellectual Property Rights Imperative of Single-Vendor Commercial Open Source Always act in …
Standard Contracts - Common Paper
Common Paper standard agreements have been downloaded more than 40,000 times and used to close millions of dollars in deals. They are created and maintained by a committee of expert attorneys and released for free under the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 License.
Startup idea checklist
I’ve been tinkering with different startup ideas and needed a good checklist to think through them. There are great templates for this already: The YC application, Amazon’s internal press release, and Sequoia’s Writing a Business Plan. I found myself mixing and tweaking these templates because they don’t exactly match my model of the world, so I wrote up my own list.
Permissive-Washing in the Open AI Supply Chain: A Large-Scale Audit of License Integrity
Permissive licenses like MIT, Apache-2.0, and BSD-3-Clause dominate open-source AI, signaling that artifacts like models, datasets, and code can be freely used, modified, and redistributed. However, these licenses carry mandatory requirements: include the full license text, provide a copyright notice, and preserve upstream attribution, that remain unverified at scale. Failure to meet these conditions can place reuse outside the scope of the license, effectively leaving AI artifacts under default copyright for those uses and exposing downstream users to litigation. We call this phenomenon ``permissive washing'': labeling AI artifacts as free to use, while omitting the legal documentation required to make that label actionable. To assess how widespread permissive washing is in the AI supply chain, we empirically audit 124,278 dataset $\rightarrow$ model $\rightarrow$ application supply chains, spanning 3,338 datasets, 6,664 models, and 28,516 applications across Hugging Face and GitHub. We find that an astonishing 96.5\% of datasets and 95.8\% of models lack the required license text, only 2.3\% of datasets and 3.2\% of models satisfy both license text and copyright requirements, and even when upstream artifacts provide complete licensing evidence, attribution rarely propagates downstream: only 27.59\% of models preserve compliant dataset notices and only 5.75\% of applications preserve compliant model notices (with just 6.38\% preserving any linked upstream notice). Practitioners cannot assume permissive labels confer the rights they claim: license files and notices, not metadata, are the source of legal truth. To support future research, we release our full audit dataset and reproducible pipeline.
AI and the Dangerous Fiction of ‘All Lawful Use’
Dunstan Allison-Hope and Iain Levine argue that human rights commitments are essential for all companies selling their products to governments worldwide.
Single-Vendor Open Source Firms (and Their Intellectual Property Strategies)
Dirk Riehle, dirk@riehle.org An edited version was published in Computer magazine, April 2020 Abstract This article present a particular business model for commercial open source firms, called the …
Founders Hub | Transform Finance
The founder playbook for building a company that lasts and stays true to why you started it. Research, case studies, and practical tools for incorporation, fundraising terms, board structure, ownership, and culture.
Open Source Startup: Why We Give Away All Our IP 🐝
Interview with Richard D. Bartlett, Loomio cofounder. Reposted with permission from Straight Up, a monthly startup resource that tackles…
Everything an open source maintainer might need to know about open source licensing | Ben Balter
There's lots of internet lore around open source licensing. An attorney and open source developer answers the most common questions.
LLC vs. corporation for startups: How to choose | Stripe
Deciding whether to form an LLC or a corporation can affect a startup’s ability to secure funding, hire talent, and manage tax liability.
YC Safe Financing Documents | Y Combinator
Information about startup documents, including the safe (simple agreement for future equity).
