The news stories in the last few months have included some pretty alarming stories about bad products that have come to us from China. And we in the west do look with disgust at failures of a government to assure that products produced by merchants are safe for consumers. This is because our government maintains a high level of control, testing, and monitoring of products to assure that the consumers of these products are protected and consumers can buy them with confidence.

Of course, this is not to say that problems with consumer protection have been eliminated. But when a product is found to be unsafe, we have a sophisticated system of recalls and alerts that go out over our media. In this way, that the damage and danger from inferior product is vastly minimized from what it might have been.

Consumer rights and protection are an important area of focus for manufacturers and merchants. These laws have a high level of importance for merchants and that drives up quality control and inspection even before the government or legal systems get involved. That is because the outcome of a recall or product failure, especially if that failure leads to injury or death of a consumer, can be devastating both to the individual merchant or company involved and to the market it serves that placing a high priority on quality is as much about market survival as it is about ethical behavior by companies.

What can we as consumers expect in the way of our rights and the protections we deserve as being part of this economy? It breaks down to what we consider to be the basics of the contract that is implied when we give someone money for a product or service?

* We expect to be able to use the goods safely with no possibility of immediate harm or long term illness as result of using the product.
* We expect the product to perform according to reasonable expectations based on what the product was promoted to do both on the package and in advertisements.
* We expect to pay what the product is advertised to cost. We do not accept changes in price after that price is advertised or surprise costs to be added on that we weren’t expecting.
* If a product fails to deliver the service it was advertised to deliver, or is found to be flawed in any way, we expect the merchant to refund or replace the product promptly and courteously.
* In the case of food, medicines or other consumables, we expect the product to be made of the highest levels of quality and to be reasonably fresh and usable.
* We expect the merchants involved in the sale of the product to stand behind the product with guarantees from the retail merchant all the way to the manufacturer.

We have not come up with this list of rights and protections on our own. These are the minimum standards prescribed by our laws to assure that the consuming public can trade with merchant in any kind of product and service and be treated with the same minimum levels of professionalism and quality assurance.

From the merchant’s point of view, you might think these high standards of consumer rights and protections would be a burden. But in fact, these laws protect both the consumer and the merchant. That is because these laws make it possible for the buying public to engage in commerce with any merchant that is authorized to do business with confidence.

Consumer protection laws make an active marketplace possible which benefits both consumers and merchants equally. So complying with consumer protection laws is not just essential from a legal point of view. It makes good sense for merchants to comply fully and perform above expectations in terms of their ability to deliver quality product to their customers. It just makes good business sense.

Creative people of all types all come back to one legal touchstone and that is copyright law. It is often sited in all kinds of cases involving literature, film, publishing and certainly in music. Within the music industry, the ability of copyright to protect an artist’s work has come under new challenges in the last ten years. The rise of peer-to-peer file sharing, online music downloading and other internet related ways that music gets passed around has presented some real challenges to musicians to collect what is due them as owners of music under copyright.

There are numerous royalty rights associated with the writing, publication, performance and distribution of music that have to be sorted out by a complicated infrastructure that the music industry maintains to protect its own. But when you get back to the basics, the copyright of a piece of music works in music the same way it does in any literary field. That copyright, at least at first, belongs to the songwriter.

That is where the simplicity of the situation ends. For most songwriters, complete ownership of a song rarely remains the exclusive property of that author of the song. Most songwriters work with a publishing house to get their music out on the market. Even if the songwriter is writing songs for their own band, the publishing house provides the valuable service of not only publishing the song or songs but getting them out on the market to be covered or produced by others as well, if that is how the songwriter wants.

So this is a valuable service that is provided by the publishing house. In exchange for handling all of the promotion of the music, the publishing house takes over 50% of the copyright. This may seem like a lot to give up but there is a hidden side to sharing copyright that benefits the songwriter maybe even more than the promotional help the publishing house provides.

Because the publishing house now has a vested interest in that creative work, they also have a vested interest in protecting it. A copyright over a piece of music, at least on paper, is a pretty strong legal right. It covers all aspects of how that song can be used. If the song is used on a recording, obviously the songwriter has some rights to the proceeds of that release. But even if the song is just covered in a performance, technically the copyright owner has some rights to payment for the use of that exclusive creative intellectual material.

The issue is as much one of enforcement as it is whether the rights are there or not. This is a judgment call to be made by the songwriter, the publishing house and the legal representation of all involved. Sometimes seeing your creative material used has such a positive marketing value that to start a legal battle for the monetary rights could hurt your music career as much as it might help you.

These are decisions that musicians and owners of copyright or royalty rights are making every day in the music industry. The debate over the value of fighting for copyright versus allowing small infractions in exchange the marketing value of your music being heard is one that is held more and more as music sharing has become more common with the spread of internet services. While a strict copyright lawyer might argue that once you stop defending your ownership, you loose it forever, the truth of the marketplace is not always that black and white. The rights are there, to be sure. But the wisdom of how to let your music make you more successful calls for the use of judgment and a savvy that comes from your extensive knowledge of how the music industry really works.

“I know my rights!” That is one of those phrases we all like to have in our arsenal if we get into a struggle, particularly with the government or a financial institution. But another phrase that is just as appropriate, especially when it comes to the rights that the legal system gives us is, “Use it or lose it.”

As much as we malign lawyers and hold the government up for ridicule, there are a lot of laws on the books that are here to protect ordinary citizens like you and I. The real crime then is when we don’t make ourselves aware of those rights or fail to take advantage of them. Nowhere is the problem more glaring then when it comes to the laws concerning estate planning, wills, trusts and inheritance.

Any estate planning lawyer can guide us through the steps of setting up legally binding documents to make sure that whatever is ours when we do pass on to the next life through death will go to the ones we want to have it. Amazingly, many people just do not take advantage of estate planning laws and their heirs find themselves trying to take care of their loved ones wishes with no will in place to protect their property.

Maybe it would help to learn more about probate which is the way the state dispenses with your property if there is no will in place. Well, the news there is not good. Not only will the government dispense with your property by its rules without any regard or guidance from you how you want your property divided when you die, there are heavy taxes that they are happy to take for the privilege. There very idea that the government can take as much as ten percent of your estate during probate should send us all running to our estate planning lawyers to get the documents in place to make sure this does not happen.

There are lots of reasons people don’t like to plan for how their property will be distributed after they pass away. No doubt the biggest one is procrastination. If you ask most people who have significant holdings that should be protected by a will why they don’t go through that exercise, the answer is often, “I will take care of that when I am older.”

The implication is that if you are not elderly, you are certainly not close enough to the moment of death to worry about it. This is an amazing assumption when anyone who rationally knows how the world works knows that people just like you and me die in car wrecks, plane crashes or even just have sudden heart attacks at young ages and leave their loved ones to sort out the estate. So confronting that potential is the first step toward developing a mature approach to estate planning.

The heart of this procrastination lies in a dread of thinking about death. Most of us would like to believe we will never die when all evidence proves the opposite. On top of that, we don’t like dealing with lawyers, we don’t like thinking about our own mortality and we fear the expense of setting up a will. None of these are rational excuses for not putting these important documents in place.
Few of us would own a car without insurance. And we buy all kinds of insurance to cover our health, our home our life and our business. If we can just think of a will in that same light, we might be motivated to insure that our estate is properly distributed when we pass on. It’s just as important as any insurance, especially to your family and loved ones.