The internet can seem like a bit of a wild frontier when it comes to artists’ rights, intellectual property and ownership of images and copy. That’s why we’re big fans of The Law Office of Kelly Kocinsky. Kelly is a New York City-based lawyer who provides highly-specialized legal services and attentive counsel to artists, small businesses and individuals. She’s a fantastic resource!

Kelly’s practice focuses on transactional matters for individual artists, intellectual property law for artists and small businesses; entity formation and asset identification and protection for small businesses.  We love that she understands that artists have needs that are specialized and offers services to assist those in the arts and ensure that their endeavors are protected. Kelly offers the following services for artists, small business-owners and individuals in a cost-efficient manner:

• General contract drafting and revision

• Collaboration agreements

• Intellectual property identification, assessment, planning and due dilligence

• Website copyright, trademark and domain name evaluation

• Confidentiality, nondisclosure, noncompete and IP-related agreements

• Music licensing

• Rights, clearances and negotiation

• Terms of use and privacy policy development for blogs and websites

• Copyright counseling

• Alternative dispute counseling and negotiation strategy

She’s been an excellent resource for us. Please contact her if you’ve hit a “gray area” or just need legal guidance as you get a project or business off the ground. Tell her the JPD team sent you!

Posted by Krista Chambers  /  Filed under Recommended  /  Comments: 0

Today I joined the Make Mine a Million $ Business RACE aka the M3 RACE. The contest is aimed towards women entrepreneurs with an already established business or with a business in mind who are ready to reach for the million dollar mark. By joining the race, the website www.makemineamillion.org will help you reach your goal by providing:

• Cutting-edge on-line business assessment with expert advice and education
• Personalized “dashboard” to track your goals and annual revenue
• Social network to find other M3 RACE participants and post questions
• Invitations to three national educational and networking events
• Opportunities to reach new national markets with partners like American Express OPEN, Reader’s Digest, Dell and Sam’s Club
• Promotion through local and national TV, newspapers, magazines, radio, and blogs

The race starts January 27, 2009 and ends December 30, 2009, entry fee is $100. The winner will get $100,000 cash for their business with national PR, advertising and press, and other business-boosting and work-life-balancing prizes for success on the national and state level.

I strongly encourage women entrepreneurs who want to push their business to the next level to join the race. I look forward to the challenges to come and hope to count on the support of everyone around me to reach this goal!

Posted by Jessica Perilla  /  Filed under Recommended  /  Comments: 0

This site offers a great community for designers that want to get their work out to professionals in the industry or want to share their work with other designers. I signed up about two weeks ago after meeting the lovely Karen Horton, the co-founder of design:related. After her invitation to sign up, I immediately set up an account and was pleasantly surprised at how clean and easy their interface was to use, adding portfolio pieces was a breeze and in minutes I added all of my friends that were already members to my network.

The site has a lot of great features, some of the few that I’ve used and really enjoy are: being able to mark other members as influential, integrating your flickr photo feed, maintaining a blog of inspirations, posting news entries that get pulled onto the homepage, and being able to sort content on the site by most influential, most viewed, newest, just added or simply via keyword tags.

If you’re a design professional or student, I definitely recommend you sign up to this wonderful site. It’s a great way to network with other talented designers, find inspiration and get feedback on your work. And once you sign up, don’t forget to add me to your network: http://www.designrelated.com

Posted by Jessica Perilla  /  Filed under Recommended  /  Comments: 0