IP Picks🔎: America's OG Sushi Slingers, a Wicked Cinderella
➕the unlikely fishermen who get reeled into a drug-smuggling op, a mystery for 'Daisy Jones' and 'Wild' fans
Welcome to The Optionist! The story of ABC laying off Nate Silver and downsizing the data journalism site FiveThirtyEight caught my attention, and not just because I’ve been a fan of the empirical rigor that statistician-turned-journalist Silver brought to election coverage.
Back in 2007, he was a stats geek working for Baseball Prospectus when he turned his attention to elections and the unreliability of polling. Ahead of the 2008 election his new site, FiveThirtyEight.com, brought rigor to poll watching by showing how some polls were skewed and how aggregating poll data could produce better results — a sort of wisdom-of-the-crowd approach. It became the go-to site for political junkies. Soon after, he partnered with the New York Times. Between elections, 538 did all sorts of other data-driven news analysis — and then the site was acquired by ESPN. Eventually, it was moved to ABC after the sports-elections mix didn’t gel.
Recently, ABC announced it was downsizing the site, cutting staff by about 50 percent, and Silver tweeted that his contract was up and he’d be leaving. All of this appears driven by the same cost-cutting that’s happening across the industry. The company seems to have thought it could run the site on the cheap by axing the expense of its founder’s salary and other staff.
But here’s the problem ABC found itself in, and why this story is of interest to me: Turns out ABC didn’t actually own a lot of FiveThirtyEight’s underlying IP — the formulas and such it used to model predictions. ABC was just licensing it from Silver and didn’t seem to have totally grasped that before it let him leave. Now, according to Semafor, the company is scrambling to keep the site going as it tries to sort out this mess. Here’s a truly damning quote in the article from a source: “They have put very very very little bandwidth into managing 538, and they seem pretty clueless about who-owns-what IP questions.”
There are so many lessons here and they all point to the importance of paying attention to the IP you do and don’t own. Silver, who seems to have known what he sold and what he just licensed to ABC, was okay leaving because he knew what he could take with him. ABC, on the other hand, miscalculated because it didn’t fully grasp its IP deal with Silver.
If there’s one piece of advice I get from IP lawyers and others over and over, it’s to pay attention to exactly what IP is included in any transaction. What to sell varies from transaction to transaction and sometimes it is worth it to sell more now rather than hold onto something with the hope of monetizing its future value. No deal is inherently “good” or “bad” — what is bad is being ignorant of the deal terms. And as the ABC/FiveThirtyEight saga illustrates, even corporations aren’t always paying attention.
On to this week’s picks, which span from a female-centered drama of self-discovery to a fun retelling of a classic fairy tale, to a wild story of weed smugglers and Maine fishermen, as well as two different suggestions for bringing Ulysses Grant’s life to the screen. The lineup:
A fantasy that reimagines Cinderella as a cunning grifter in the center of a love triangle.
A mystery about the half-century old disappearance of a feminist socialite that’s also a story of female self-discovery.
A potential biopic inspired by a fictional telling of the life of Ulysses Grant.
A drama about how the U.S. government tried to take down the original KKK in the 1870s.
A thriller about drug smugglers and fishermen off the Maine coast.
A business drama about an unlikely partnership that brought sushi to America.
