A little intellectual property law philosophy reared its symmetrical head when I pulled my debit card out of my pocket and looked at it held upside down.
“Holy balls, it’d be totally easy to modify the Wachovia logo to make it into an ambigram.” You know, an ambigram, like what they talk about in that less-than-thrilling book, The Da Vinci Code.
The advantages of having an ambigram logo are obvious: no matter how a debit card or brochure or letterhead or whatever are held the logo will still be readable. What big-name bank wouldn’t want this kind of thing? I could be paid handsomely for such an idea!
Then the questions came. How could I solicit this to Wachovia? I’d probably have to know someone on the inside for this to even reach the desk of someone remotely in charge. How could I protect the intellectual property of my idea? How would I keep Wachovia from ripping off my idea and making an ambigram of their own? After all, my work is a derivative of their intellectual property. Since it is derivative, is it automatically their property? If not and they do rip off the design, could I say that their new logo would be a derivative work of my work and then sue them? If I sued them, would I then gain ownership of Wachovia Bank? What if they come up with an ambigram that looks entirely different from mine, would a lawsuit against them hold any water? I mean, can I somehow protect the mere idea of turning their logo into an ambigram and not just my design? People are able to show scripts to movie executives in some way that protects them from having their idea getting ripped off, right? In that case, can I also protect the idea I had about making a pair of glasses that when you put them on you see people glow with varying shades of brightness depending on how attracted they are to you? To best protect my idea do I just have to come up with lots of designs for possible ambigrams and hope that that covers all bases? Why did I eat both those pork chops? Am I to die in my bed?
Instead of trying anything fancy, I decided to make a design, post it to my blog and see what my readers think of all of this.