Peter Jones and ‘Own-it North’

Further to my post a few weeks ago about Dragons Den and patents, I’ve just stumbled across the Own-it North website, via Manchester Digital Development Agency. Their mission is:

To provide creative people and businesses based in the North with the relevant knowledge, advice and support to protect, exploit and value their intellectual property and take full advantage of the capital contained therein, the resulting business developments and growth.

…which is quite a mouthful of a sentence. The agency provide advice and legal support to creative agencies, on such issues as trade marks, copyright, and non-disclosure agreements. My favourite bit of contradicting advice is:

Be clear in any employment or service contract as to what counts as work made during employment and outside of employment. Try and limit the contract to allow you to produce work for yourself in your own free time if you are an employee. If you are an employer try and do the reverse.

I’ve only really scratched the surface of the site, but an interview with Dragon’s Den’s Peter Jones (PDF) caught my eye. It’s mostly a big plug for Peter’s TV company (who are producing a new TV series) and forthcoming book (’The Millionaire Mindset’, a ludicrous title) and contains such waffly quotes as “I learned at an early age that daring to dream big pays dividends, literally”. However he also gives out stunningly good nuggets of advice such as “use the internet” to “do internet searches”. The internet eh? Never heard of it…

I mock, but there is some genuinely useful advice on the website. Probably.

Nowhere did I see the suggestion that giving ideas, content and information away can sometimes be the best strategy though, which is something I and my colleagues are big fans of.