Posts Tagged: "failure"

Judge Finds Taylor Swift Lyrics Lack Originality and Creativity

So uncreative did Judge Michael Fitzgerald find Taylor Swift’s 2014 hit Shake It Off, he dismissed a copyright infringement case filed against her. In his opinion Judge Michael Fitzgerald explained the allegedly infringing lyrics used by Swift lacked even the modest level of creativity required for copyright protection… “The concept of actors acting in accordance with their essential nature is not at all creative; it is banal,” Fitzgerald worte. “In the early 2000s, popular culture was adequately suffused with the concepts of players and haters to render the phrases ‘playas … gonna play’ or ‘haters … gonna hate,’ standing on their own, no more creative than ‘runners gonna run,’ ‘drummers gonna drum,’ or ‘swimmers gonna swim.’”

When Failure Becomes an Asset

Failure is success if we learn. So why shouldn’t failure qualify as a trade secret? Competitors would love to avoid making the effort and taking the risk… Negative information is most commonly put at risk not by theft of the records of R&D, but by departing employees who are familiar with how a particular technical solution was created or optimized. Eager to help their new colleagues, a recent arrival may wince at a suggested development path and blurt out a warning not to go there. Even very general pointers about an engineering direction to try or to avoid can help a competitor reduce risk and shorten development time. That is why hiring someone who has worked on a similar project for a competitor can lead to trouble.

Failing Your Way to Success

Consider, for example, the old axiom that entrepreneurs must be unwaveringly fixated on a single goal. Most startups are built around a single product or service that is assumed (but not yet proven) to meet a real consumer need and offer a lucrative market opportunity. The CEO of that startup is likewise singularly focused on getting a fully-baked product out the door as soon as possible in order to start generating revenues while at the same time building a pipeline for future offerings. Given the limited resources in most startups, this often means that the engineers are building Version 2 of the product before Version 1 has even been tested in the market.