One thing that still amazes me is how often magicians complain about people stealing from each other but they don’t take the most basic steps to protect their ideas. The myth is that you can’t legally protect a magic trick, but the reality is that you can. It’s through a patent, the problem with patenting magic is that it’s an expensive and time consuming process.
There have been some very successful magicians who have patented magic tricks. Yigal Mesika patents a lot of his stuff and of course the D’lite is a good example of a magic trick that was very successful where a patent helped protect it.
I personally use copyrights to protect my instruction sheets, art and ad copy. So I’m able to remove people that are pirating those. Then I use a trademark to protect my name, so that even if someone changes my ad copy, they can’t use my name. I have started to trademark the names of my shows, this makes it harder for people to steal the concept of my that particular show.
The challenge with trademarks is that they still take time. The current one I’m working on has been in the system for over a year and hopefully will be approved soon as I just got the notification of publication for it. That means is passed all of the internal USPTO objections and now it just needs to be put out in the monthly publication for normal people to object to it.
If you’re worried about having your ideas stolen, check out copyright.gov and USPTO.gov, they will give you a lot of information about the differences in IP and the processes.
-Louie