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Product Creators Need Ownership Agreements

By Amy E. Feldman

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - If you and your buddies invent the best new product, what's the first thing you should do?

Snapchat, the ingenious app teenagers use to send risqué photos of themselves that they think disappear, made huge headlines when Facebook offered to buy it for 3 billion dollars to which the Snapchat brats said, yeah no thanks.

Perhaps they had bigger fish to fry - like fighting with each other in a case that just settled over who has ownership interests.

Look, everyone knows you should register/patent/trademark/copyright and get all kinds of protections for a product, but before you do that, write up a contract with your co-creating buddies. Think big - down the road, when it's worth three billion dollars, how much of this product should you get credit for creating? And what if one of you leaves or, graduates high school, and moves on but the others keeps working. How much then?

If you believe in your product, write down how you foresee your future, with or without each other. And then, consider hiring your own lawyers with experience who can guide you on what is and isn't reasonable in a partnership agreement or at least Google partnership agreements before your friendship disappears faster than a photo on snapchat.

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