It really annoys me when magicians complain about having their tricks ripped off when they haven’t taken the most basic steps to protect them. I’m not an advocate for knocking off magic tricks, but I am an advocate for magicians to put on their big boy pants and realizing that once they sell a trick, they are in business and it’s a different set of ethics.
Most magic tricks would require a patent to fully protect it, however those aren’t guaranteed to be approved, take time and costly. I’m not saying it’s a bad idea to patent a magic trick, but there are other easier and cheap. The good news is there are other ways to protect your magic!
Two Simple and Effective Ways to Protect Your Magic Tricks
The first way that I protect my marketed magic tricks is formally registering the copyright for the ad copy, art and instructions with the US Copyright Office. Yes, I understand that technically you have a copyright the moment you put the words/art into a physical/digital form, however it’s not enforceable until you get the registration number. I’ve have great success in having knock off products removed from eBay and AliExpress by using my copyright registration numbers.
Registering copyrights is cheap at under $100 if you do it yourself and it’s not hard to do.
The second way I’m trying to protect my business is new. I just trademarked the name Louie Foxx, so it’s now officially Louie Foxx ®. Having the trademark stops people from using my name on knock off or counterfeit products.
I filed for the trademark myself and while it wasn’t hard to do, I did have to do a little bit of back and forth with the examiner. It was more procedural stuff and not remotely difficult. I think it was less than $300 for the first 5 years. It did take 14 months for it to finally be approved, so it takes some time, I do think there is a way you can pay more to speed it up.
So there you have a couple of easy and relatively cheap ways to give your marketed magic tricks basic protection.
-Louie
PS I’m not an attorney, so you should probably contact someone more qualified for legal advice before making any decisions.
