This class should focus on action

In class on Monday, we discussed many aspects of typical IP protection entities except for patents (copy rights, trade secrets, etc). We spent a good amount of time talking about isolated conditions (if-then issues) but I wonder the applicability to our students. I felt there was a lack of actionable items that we could take in the next few years of our professional lives to protect the awesome things we create. For example, we learned about the duration of copyright validity, including transitive rights after the death of the owner. While this is definitely important information, the inner workings of copyrights are not what young, would-be entrepreneurs are thinking about. We want to know what we can do, given our limited resources, to protect our IP. The only tidbit of advice was that we should email evidence of copyright to ourselves. That is valuable, but I only wish we had much more of this.