Binge Factor Media

With podcasters churning out an endless string of content within and beyond their shows, they must know how to preserve and inherently build their value. Proper knowledge of copyright ownership is a must to safeguard your podcast, and the best person to help out in this regard is The Podcast Lawyer, Gordon P. Firemark, Esq. Sitting down with Tracy Hazzard, he discusses how to protect your intellectual property without messing around with productivity and creativity. He explains the right way to promote your guest appearances on other shows and keep possession of your RSS feed. Gordon also talks about the impact of the rampant use of AI tools and deepfakes in approaching copyright and trademark rules.

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Navigating The Legal World Of Podcasting How Copyright Can Safeguard Your Podcast With The Podcast Lawyer, Gordon P. Firemark, Esq. Of The Entertainment Law Update Podcast

I have an OG podcaster for this episode, a podcaster who’s been in and around the industry for quite some time. He is known as The Podcast Lawyer™. He has been instrumental in helping us podcasters understand how to stay creative, stay legal, and maybe get some IP in the process, some Intellectual Property going. Gordon Firemark helps creatives, artists, entrepreneurs, and others achieve the dream of getting their messages out and making them meaningful impact.

He has practiced Media, Entertainment, and Business Law since 1992, and is often referred to as The Podcast Lawyer™. As a podcaster himself, he has been producing and hosting the Entertainment Law Update podcast since 2009, and has also launched More. Better. Faster podcast as long as some others that he is going to talk to us about. He’s the author of The Podcast, Blog & New Media Producer’s Legal Survival Guide, and the creator of several online courses for creators.

He is phenomenal. If you haven’t heard of Gordon Firemark and you have been in the industry for a while, I’d be shocked because he’s spoken on so many fantastic stages. That’s how we met. As we were doing a meet-up event here in California, he and I finally got to meet in person. His voice is wonderfully a radio podcast voice. It’s so wonderfully resonant, and I know you are going to enjoy getting to know him, and he’s exactly like that in person.

It’s going to be a fun episode. We are going to talk about podcast practices and things about copyright. We are going to talk a little bit about AI. We have got a whole bunch of little things in here mixed in. This is going to be quite a varied episode with lots of topics that will interest you. Join us as we talk more to Gordon Firemark, The Podcast Lawyer™.

Gordon, I’m so glad to talk with you. We got to meet up in person. I have heard of you in the industry. I have read your book. I have gotten to hear your show many times, and we finally got to meet at a Meetup. I’m so glad. What I realized is your voice in person is as wonderful as it is over the mic.

Thank you. I’m glad to be here. It’s great to have connected with you a couple of months ago and established this relationship. It’s wonderful. Thanks.

I have to say that talking about podcast law might be boring to some people, but it fascinates me. It’s highly necessary for us to get into talking about this. Most podcasters, bloggers, and even video creators, entertainment or media in all these forms, underestimate the value of what they are creating from an intellectual property standpoint.

I agree. I started out working in live theater. Creative people come at things with creativity being the main goal, “Let’s be creative, let’s have some fun, let’s do this thing, and let’s make stuff,” and they don’t think about creating a lasting value around it or how they are going to monetize it or whether they are going to monetize it. It’s only when they start to think about that because, “Now I have got this fun hobby. How do I make it worthwhile?”

“How do I pay for it?”

That’s when they start having to think about it, and often by then, it’s a little late in the game. Other threats come from various angles if you don’t have stuff in the way. That’s what I’m here for. It is to educate, inform, and help creative people in all disciplines to get set up and protect themselves a bit.

Something that most people don’t realize is that they think that because we are using an RSS feed, which is a publicly distributed media type, doesn’t mean you forgo your rights.

In fact, those rights become even more important when the stuff is out there. You can’t chain a podcast to a fence and say, “That’s mine. Don’t take it.”

No one’s going to listen to it if you just had it there, so you do have to distribute it.

One of the risks is that people come along and grab chunks of it or the whole thing sometimes, and use it improperly. Nowadays, there are all kinds of other weird technology things that can happen. The other side of this is when podcasters are creating, that act of being creative, you want to bring in stuff that other people made, music, poetry, spoken word clips, video, or whatever. Doing that in a safe and smart way matters so that you can continue making your stuff because if you don’t do it right, they will put a stop to it eventually.

It goes both ways. It goes to what you include in the content. Are you in a discussion about a book? Do you read a quote from that book? Did you play a clip from something? Any of those things matter, but what someone else does with your show matters too. We want them to promote our show, but we also don’t want them to trip over and pass it off as theirs. That’s the key there. When you were attributing something and linking back to the original source, we are honoring that connection, but too often we forget to do it.

You do have to be careful when you link back to that original source or reference. We have all seen those YouTube videos where the description will say something like, “No copyright infringement intended.” Oftentimes, that’s more of a smoking gun than exculpatory. It’s not going to get you out of trouble if you are infringing somebody’s copyright by saying, “I didn’t mean to.” It doesn’t matter. What I’m here to do is make sure people understand the rules and understand where the boundaries and exceptions exist, and hopefully navigate them in a smart, sane, and productive way.

You are my guest on this show. Let’s do it from that perspective so everybody could get an understanding of it. If you are a guest on a podcast, what do you think is fair use in terms of promoting that episode, like clipping and making mentions of it? What do you think is a fair use there?

Linking to it is fair and referencing maybe a small snippet or something. The way I do it is I rely on the host to give me the collateral material to use to promote it, so that way I know that what you have given me, you are okay with me sharing it on my social media and stuff like that. I am dead set against podcast hosts giving the raw file or even the finished file to the guest because you lose control. You don’t have any way of saying, “That’s still what I created.” There are technological ways that a guest who wants to can download the file and do something with it if they want, but why make it easy and why give them permission, implicit or otherwise?

Copyright Ownership: Do not give raw files of your podcast episodes to your guests because you will lose control over your own content.

You have a link to a guest release and the language that you utilize there, and podcast release is what you call it. It outlines exactly what they are allowed and not allowed to do. That’s important to the state.

It’s one of these things that creators don’t think about. Two or more people getting together to make something, who owns it? They all do. It’s a joint creation. If you are the podcaster, you are the one with the investment in the technology and the software, all the tools, not to mention your time and energy. You want to own it.

You want to have A) Have the right to make the recording in the first place. That’s part of what the release includes. B) You want the consent to use it, in the ways you intend to. I generally try to be as expansive as possible about that because you never know. You might decide to use transcripts and make a book sometime or an online course. You want the guest to know, “I don’t intend that this is jointly owned. This is mine. I’m the copyright owner.” That means you can only use it in the ways I say you can use it.

Some podcasters trip over that because they have paid guests, and then there becomes, “What’s that contract between us? Who does own that? Can I have a say in that when I’m already paying for it?” That’s one of the reasons I’m not a proponent of paid guest spots because it muddies that tremendously.

We are on the same page about that. I also think it’s not a great thing, although I do see that there is a place for it. It’s more about don’t try to pull the wool over your audience’s eyes if that’s the case.

Also, very often they fail to put anything in any notes that say this was a paid spot.

If someone’s paying you for the endorsement of who they are, what they are about, their message, or their product, that’s a paid ad. You have got a program link advertisement. If your audience comes to listen to you because they trust what you say as a host and that you believe in the guests you have on, they have a right to know, “I got paid for having so-and-so.” That’s not something that the FTC is talking about yet, but it’s only a matter of time.

It is a pretty gray area if you are in that space. I have heard of some people accepting rush fees to move something up in a promotion. I’m okay with that because it is costly to edit a show and if you need me to move mine up in my production schedule. I could see that happening, but that’s clearly what it’s for after the recording. I would prefer to record first and then accept a fee if I were going to do it.

Even that, you could do a simple disclosure that says, “Listeners, I originally had something else planned for this week, but so-and-so has something exciting they want to tell you about. We recorded them a month ago and have decided to bump them up in the schedule. We have received some promotional consideration. Here you go. Enjoy.”

Your audience will appreciate the honesty.

That transparency is super important.

I agree with you on that one. There’s a little bit of a misunderstanding about RSS feeds in general. Let’s talk about that. The copyright is listed that it’s one of the line items that should be in your RSS feed. Most people don’t do it properly, so that’s one of the things I would love to have you confirm for them. If the copyright is owned by you or your company, does that make a difference? Should you have both in your copyright line?

I have never thought about that question before. Copyright is fairly easy to own. You make something as long as it’s original and you fix it in some tangible form. You record the thing, and you own the copyright. Now, who are you in the equation when you are part of a company or when you have a company? I generally say the company is the owner of the reserves and proceeds.

If they are paying for the podcast, then they should be the owner technically.

If you are talking about an employee of a business and podcasting is a part of that business’s expectations of you as the employee, then the company absolutely owns it. That’s what we call work made for hire. It’s one of the two ways that something can be worked for hire. An employee created it, the employer owns it. The other way is if an independent contractor created it, but you have a written contract. It has to be in writing and it has to specifically express that the results of the work will be a work for hire for the employing party or the hiring party. That’s where we get into tricky stuff with folks like editors.

Mostly I find it on a producer level. Not a lot of editors are good about that, but I find producers more often have a problem.

Anybody who touches your show and brings in any creative input could argue with degrees of success, “I co-own that episode. I’m a co-owner of the copyright in that.” Getting that in writing is super important. You are going to hear that from me over and over again. Get it in writing.

We are going to rehash that all day. I love that. It’s important, and I agree with you on that. It’s one of our policies. In our company, Podetize, it’s explicit that we do not own the work that our clients do. That’s because we don’t want any gray area in that.

In other circumstances, a network or a platform might want to own.

They are paying for it, they are funding it, and they have grown it.

I talk about having a podcast prenup. It’s about laying out these expectations early on in the relationship.

I love the prenup idea. It was one of my favorite episodes that I listened to because we have had a lot of cohosts go bad, and laying out an understanding of it is important from the beginning.

It’s an apt metaphor because you are getting into this relationship with a cohost or a co-producer, and things don’t always work. Relationships get weird, especially when money becomes a factor. You ask the question, “Who gets the house? Who gets the kids?” while the house is the episode content, and the kids are the RSS feed, the audience.

Here’s another thing that I find often goes wrong with RSS feeds. The host doesn’t understand if their email address isn’t on that if they are not in possession of the RSS feed and where it goes, whatever email address is associated with it is who has the rights to move it to do things with it. Some of them have lost that in their production model of hiring other people and don’t even understand that they are not in possession of their feed.

It’s important that when you are starting a new show if you are starting a new hosting account or a new feed, you need to be very explicit with the hosting company about who this is. It’s so often people will start a show together and one person says, “I will take care of that side, and you take care of the email.” Now when the breakup happens, you have got one party holding the email addresses for ransom and the others holding the RSS feed.

I guess you have been through this before.

I have been through it several times, not as a party, but as a lawyer representing people in these situations. The only people who come out ahead if you haven’t thought it through early are the lawyers.

Thank you for saying that, but yes. That’s why we do want people to start thinking this through ahead. This is also something that we have received. We have had some clients who have emailed somebody through their RSS feed because there’s an email address in there. It’s publicly available, and it says, “I’d like to be a guest on your show,” and they get the nastiest message back from the podcast host that says, “How’d you get my email?” They will be like, “You need to understand that it’s publicly available and people are going to find it.”

That’s something that’s in the midst of changing right now. The RSS feed is no longer going to show the email address of the owner of the feed out of concerns for privacy, spamming, and so on because there were some less scrupulous companies that were scraping RSS feeds to gather up these lists. There are four million total podcasts out there. You get that list together pretty quickly that could be abused.

There are whole companies, who shall remain nameless here, who then resell the list to assistance, press agents, and other things. If you are doing one-on-one and I’m reaching out to an individual who has that, I think that’s fair. I’m saying, “I’m a right fit for your show. Let’s have a conversation about it. I looked you up. I did it. It was there. If it’s no longer there, then I got to go to the hard route, which is to find your website and find you,” and that’s okay too.

Which shouldn’t be that hard. If you are interested in having guests on your show, you want to be reachable about the company. The price you pay is you get those pitches from people who are not qualified.

Copyright Ownership: If you are interested in having guests on your show, you want to be reachable about the company. The price you pay is getting those pitches from people who are not qualified.

That’s why I do recommend to my clients to set up an individual, a special email address that is for that so you can do a lot of spam filtering. This is understanding that this is the home and the holder of your intellectual property here, but it’s also the holder of access to you and the holder of your subscribers in a sense. It’s important that it’s done right.

Often people start a show where somebody said, “I will make that RSS. I will sign up for the hosting.” Later, they come back and start a company, form an LLC, or something like that to formalize that relationship. They get that prenup stuff happening and nobody thinks to go and update the records at the hosting service. There are financial things. You are supposed to use a company credit card to pay the bill, but at some point, the company shouldn’t be identified as the owner of the account and therefore the RSS feed. That will streamline things if you ever need to move the RSS feed or if you end up having one of these podvorces that I call, the breakup.

This happened to a client of mine. His company got bought out. He was restricted from continuing his podcast, but he technically didn’t sell it to them. I thought, “You missed an opportunity to make some more money. It has value.” We talked about that after and he was like, “I should have called you.”

Or to retain the right to keep doing the show. Frankly, we are having a good advisor, someone who can look at the deal and identify those loopholes and say, “Ask the right questions. What about this? What about the show? Is it going with the deal or is it not?”

You have got a few shows that you have done over the years. You have got Entertainment Law Update, which you have been doing for quite some time. That one specifically focused on lawyers and law students and giving them this view on media. You have got Entertainment Law Asked & Answered, the law podcasting podcast, which I thought was a mouthful, but I liked it because it was a mouthful. Now you have got Legit Podcast Pro and another one coming up with our friend Elsie Escobar from She Podcasts, Fuzzy Lawgic.

I’m going to talk a little bit. Entertainment Law Update is the show that I began in 2009. We are several years of doing that show. It’s a monthly update of the legal news in the entertainment and media industries. We are recording our 154th episode. By the time this comes out, it will probably be 155th. We kept going almost every month since April of 2009, and here we are.

My cohost and I have a good time. It’s a little high-level discussion, so it’s not for the casual reader. If you are interested in the field of entertainment or copyrights and trademarks and those kinds of things, there’s something there for you. The other shows you mentioned, the Law Podcasting podcast, was me talking to other lawyers who have podcasts because, at the time, I had a course on how to podcast, but it was targeted at lawyers. The course was called Power Podcasting for Lawyers, and I was teaching other lawyers how to do it. This was my proof of concept or social proof entertainment line in the industry insights just never took off.

We always have one of those. All of us do.

We podfaded. The new one, I have been doing Legit Podcast Pro, which is talking to podcasters, YouTube creators, and folks like that about these legal issues that they need to be thinking about. It’s mostly solo right now. I do plan to have some guests coming in the future because I want to be more than that legal guy talking about the law stuff. There’s a lot more to podcasting.

You are doing that one video first, so you have more of that video model?

I go livestream on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube all simultaneously every Thursday afternoon to do that. We then strip the audio out and put that into a feed for those who want to listen on the go. I’m not sure that’s necessary anymore with YouTube being what it is, but we will keep it up.

Some of us like the playlist model, like the push. I do think there’s still a model-first serious binge listener. That’s always a good thing because it’s all in one place easier to navigate. I think YouTube gets distracting. That’s my personal view of it because all the other videos follow up, and it doesn’t always follow in your channel only. That’s distracting.

When you are doing video, you as the maker get distracted by the bells and whistles and having to put things up on screen and so on. I try not to do too much of that. I have got a pretty good workflow down. I came out of the live television production world, so I’m pretty good at having a program rundown and making it happen.

That brings me to the next one, which is what you mentioned. Fuzzy Lawgic is a show that I was approached by the folks over at NumoSpect, Creator Lab, Bri Campano, and Trevor Tomion, who asked me to do this show where we would be addressing more than just the legal but the social and ethical, applying lots of different lenses to issues that are facing creators and society.

When we started to do this, I said, “Great, but I’m another old White guy. We need someone else to be on this panel with me and it needs to be somebody who is not an old White guy.” We hit a home run. We went looking. We asked Elsie Escobar, and she was pleased to join us. She’s terrific. She brings a very different perspective to things, and we work well together.

She has such a good human-centered view of things. That makes it a better show, number one. Number two, that has that aspect of thinking through as a creator like, “Is this what I want? Is this right for me? Is this the way to go?”

That show happens live Friday mornings, 11:00 AM Eastern, and 8:00 AM Pacific. We are in week three. In week two, we talked about deepfake technology and how that can affect things. It reaches much further than we think of a fake of the president saying something he didn’t say or those kinds of things. It is interesting to have those conversations. We end up asking more questions than coming up with answers. In our first episode, we talked about the AI technology that everybody’s talking about these days.

We were talking about it a little bit before. We were saying that, “I’m sure this is going to come up because it seems to come up in every conversation.” There are a lot of things in AI that are going on now that come into question. There are a lot of things coming on. There are lawsuits already in place with Getty Images, image creation, and training data sets that they didn’t maybe have the authorization to use. I have my opinion on it, but I’m not a lawyer. We will see what legal precedents get said over there. There’s that. There’s also this idea of my voiceprint being mine.

That’s where the deepfake conversation ended up going. I had been interviewed on another show. It was voice actors. They were saying, “If anybody can go grab my voice print and make an ad for the competitor of one of the companies that have paid me to do a voice for their ad, now I’m in hot water.” An example was if I do voices for Toyota and now someone puts together a Honda ad and uses a sound like my voice, Honda is not going to hire me anymore. It’s got a direct economic impact. Not to mention that they didn’t get paid to do the voicing of the thing in the first place. That barely scratches the surface of where these legal issues are.

It is my understanding that it’s harder to tell deepfakes in the video than it is in audio. I’m trying to find more detail on why that is, but I have heard that and thought that was interesting. It’s probably because of voice patterning. The way that you and I speak has so much variation in it that you could see inauthentic patterning quickly.

It has something to do with video where there’s more to pay attention to. The eyes and the ears are both doing their job at the same time. When it’s just audio, you are tuned in more deeply to one of your senses. It is easier. We all know we can hear that cut in an audio file sometimes or is over-filtering.

Copyright Ownership: When watching a video, the eyes and the ears are doing their jobs at the same time, making it harder to identify deepfake videos at first viewing.

That’s my least favorite one. I take that one to issue.

When there’s a video also, we overlook it because we are distracted by something else.

We are assuming our internet is bad. We have that assumption.

The saying in the video is audiences will forgive bad lighting or a slightly fuzzy image or something like that if the audio is good, but the converse is not true.

That’s where I think it’s going in that way. I’m hoping we are not going to end up with a bunch of podcast deepfakes. I hope that the premonition doesn’t come through.

There was that one. Joe Rogan interviewed Steve Jobs after Steve was already dead.

We would hope that would have been pretty obvious.

That was the proof of concept.

You have also been talking about thinking about the podcast code of ethics with Elsie. I think that it might be time.

There are a bunch of journalists’ codes of ethics, depending on which organization and those kinds of things. I have been saying for a long time that podcasters need to think of ourselves as journalists. Even if you are doing storytelling, there’s an ethical code that goes there too. It goes beyond copyrights, trademarks, and plagiarism, but also how you go about presenting information and where the information is coming from. It’s that transparency we were talking about earlier. It is high time that we as a collective of podcasters started thinking about, “How are we going to draw these lines?”

On this show’s website, I have my code of ethics there. I didn’t do it from any legal standpoint. I just wanted to make a statement as to where I was on that. At the time when I first started it, I write for Inc. Magazine. Very often, my podcast would end up in an article eventually, so I wanted to make clarity between the combination of the two. I put that on my site, and it’s not often that I find that in other places.

I don’t think it is very common. It’s less about what the code of ethics says and more about the act of thinking about it and applying the overlay. What is ethical to do in this circumstance? It will be a different answer for different people, but if your audience gets where you are coming from about these things, they get to choose.

I’m so glad you said it that way because I was talking to you before our interview part here that we are working on an AI code of ethics within our company. It’s not about the actual letter of it. It is about the intention of it and making sure that we are all clear on our whole team what our intention of the use of AI is and what we think trips over things that unintended consequences in our case of harming creators’ value because that’s one of our primary ethical basis for everything that we have made decisions for in our company already. We want to make sure we continue that through. We have got new team members and new coders. We want to say, “This is what Tom and I believe. This is why we think we need to screen decisions that might violate that.”

We have been talking about ethics more and more. It’s been in the consciousness more. Frankly, the last couple of presidential elections has probably had something to do with that and how things are going in American politics. It’s interesting. It’s time we creators at least think about this stuff.

One more thing before we head into a couple of final questions here. I want to mention that you are coming out with the legal course for podcasters. What’s going to be in that course? Tell us a little bit about it.

The program is called Easy Legal for Podcasters. It is 4 or 5 modules of legal stuff. I don’t want to go through all what those modules are. I want to help the folks who need a little help but don’t necessarily have the resources to hire a lawyer to come on board and do it all for you.

Especially if you don’t know if your podcast is going to take off yet. You need that interim and then maybe you build up to the pro level.

I love it when people have got T’s crossed and I’s dotted before they come to me so we can focus on the bigger higher-level issues, and I’m not worried about setting up the minimum.

In that Easy Legal course, we are thinking about setting a good basis for your intellectual property perhaps in the future for values for who owns what. What are some other outcomes that might happen?

We look at setting up a foundational business structure for your show. That’s not something that everybody needs, but many should be considering that. It’s working with your team. Some of the things we talked about. When you start to bring people onto the team, they are all contributing creative input to your show. You got to make sure those contracts are in writing and those deals are done. There’s the intellectual property stuff who owns what.

I do want to point out, Gordon does what I think to be the way to do it. He has trademarked The Podcast Lawyer™. He not only does that. Often I see a lot of you put your company name or your trademarked name into your RSS feed and author field of what’s distributed out to the podcast apps and forget to put your name too. Gordon does both. He’s got both in there and I’m so glad you do.

I call myself Gordon Firemark, The Podcast Lawyer™. That is my brand.

That way if somebody were to say, “I can’t remember his name, but I know The Podcast Lawyer™,” and they type it in, he’s going to show up and that’s why I like that you do both.

That’s branding. That’s not legal stuff per se, but there you go. The fourth component of the Easy Legal Program is monetization, making sure you have got the right deals for the particular model you are using for monetizing your show. It’s not about advertising sales. Certainly, we have a template agreement, and that’s what the program is. It’s me giving instructions and walking you through step-by-step how to do some of these things and also providing the templates, forms, checklists, and worksheets to make it almost as easy.

I have moved up this episode. Gordon didn’t pay me for that, but that’s okay. I offer to move it up because it’s valuable to all of you reading out there. I have moved it up to make sure that this episode airs before his course goes live so that we can make sure that happens.

What’s going live on the 27th of March 2023 is my workshop. It’s a free online webinar workshop called Business & Legal Fundamentals for Podcast Growth & Profit. You will get a lot of the basics. I guess you could say you get a lot of the what in this presentation that I will be doing on the 27th. From there, I will tell you how you can get in on special promotions for Easy Legal for Podcasters.

We will make sure because this is extremely important, and a lot of you I know have been asking questions about this. We don’t touch on it very often, but when we do, we get copyright questions, creative questions on contracts for ad programs, and other things. The legal side of it is a big question that comes up a lot when we open up our Q&As.

I’m happy to support this because Gordon is an expert. He is truly the podcast lawyer, and we want to make sure that all can get on it early on. We will make that available. You have got a lot of podcasts going on and you have been doing this for a while. Is there anything that you feel you have been getting such a great return on investment from this? What is that, and what are you going to do more of in the future?

I am going to be doing more of the not video-first but the video also podcasting. I enjoy it, to be honest with you. I think I have a face made for radio.

You are very animated in the videos.

I just enjoy it and I enjoy the interactive because when I do that show, before and after I do the scheduled program, I do some Q&A with the audience and try to interact a little bit. That doesn’t make it into the RSS feed, but it does make it into the YouTube channel. I will be devoting a little more attention to the YouTube channel itself. I see a return on investment there. It’s the thing that positions me as an expert in my field that people find in search because YouTube is such a powerful search engine and tends to be shorter format than podcasts, which people have to commit to reading.

Before I go, I want to make sure that everybody knows what I believe the show is for your show and you in general because it goes across all of your shows. It’s the same for me. It is that you have this wonderful soft-spoken model. You have a nice deep voice, but the way that you talk about the law, the way that you do, and the way that you talk about everything is coming straight from the heart. You are caring about the creators and caring about your audience, whether it’s the law students and the lawyers who are reading, or it’s the creators themselves. You have this deep care for that, and it comes across in this great caring way and not like, “This is gospel. This is what I say you should do.” This seems to be a little bit more of the law practice podcast model that I hear a lot, not your show at all.

A lot of lawyers are all about, “Do it this way. Do it my way,” type of thing.

They’re scaring you like, “If you don’t do it my way, you are done.” You are like, “I’m going to feel bad for you.”

That is how they teach lawyers to market. They tell them, “All the things can go wrong, but don’t worry, I can help you. I will make it go away.” That’s not how I want to market myself. My brand is about educating, sharing, and empowering creators to do their thing. I believe that freedom of speech is the most important right we have. There are lots of others. The right to speak out and get the conversations going and have the culture or society talking about important issues is so important. Any legal or governmental interference with that is dangerous. I’m here to help folks make sure they can get their message out and have the impact they desire.

Gordon, thank you for being The Podcast Lawyer™, and thank you for bringing your message to the world and helping all of us in this industry grow.

Thanks, Tracy. I appreciate the opportunity to speak to your audience and you.

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Gordon and I could talk for some time. I know you guys know that I’m a legal geek. I love intellectual property. I love all kinds of stuff like copyrights and trademarks, and so does Tom, my partner, and husband in Podetize. This is something that we care about. We care about making sure that you preserve the best value you can get from what you are creating here. A creator is inherently building value at all times.

Gordon believes in that too, and that comes across in all his shows. Whether you are listening to Legit Podcast Pro, Entertainment Law Asked & Answered, and law podcast like Entertainment Law Update, he has got them all. He also has that legal course, which is going to be fantastic and running. I am going to have a link for that because he has got this podcast law course that might be of great interest to you. I want to make sure you catch it in a timely manner so that you can catch the event as it launches.

If you are reading this show right as I put it out there, you have got days left to subscribe to it. It’s going to be great for you and you are going to enjoy it as well. Don’t always follow the old way podcasters are doing. You need to keep up and update it. That’s what I like about the way that Gordon’s working because he’s starting new shows, and he has to stay up on what’s different and what’s new now, which means that his advice is much more current.

We have to be careful as podcasters not to take OG advice just because they are a guru or because they have been around for a long time. If they haven’t been keeping up on it and staying abreast of what’s new, then they are not going to be the best advisor for you if you are launching, producing, or marketing your show. Gordon is the opposite of that. You are going to want to check out his show. You are going to want to check out some of the new things that he has got going. Don’t forget to check out that course. Gordon Firemark, everyone.

I will be back next episode with another podcaster, not another lawyer. It’s not going to happen this time. I have got somebody completely different for you. As always, if there’s a topic or area of interest that you want to read, you’ve got to reach out and let me know. Find me on social media, go to TheBingeFactor.com, and let me know what you are interested in finding out more about. Thanks, everyone, for reading. I will be back next episode.

Important Links

• The Podcast Lawyer™
• Entertainment Law Update
• More. Better. Faster
• The Podcast, Blog & New Media Producer’s Legal Survival Guide
• Entertainment Law Asked & Answered – Apple Podcasts
• Legit Podcast Pro
• Fuzzy Lawgic
• Power Podcasting for Lawyers
• Easy Legal for Podcasters
• Business & Legal Fundamentals for Podcast Growth & Profit
• https://www.Facebook.com/gfiremark/
• https://www.Instagram.com/gordonfiremark/
• https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/gfiremark

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