Welcome to Your Operations Solved, for Wednesday, April 7th, 2021

I'm your host, Channing Norton, of PC Solutions, and this is the Seventh episode of our show,
Listen to us Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or on our Saturday compilations. If you find the show helpful or informative, please do give it a like on your platform of choice, or share it to someone else who might also like it.

With that, let's get onto today's headlines

Supreme court ruling strengthens "Fair Use" protections in copyright.

On Monday, the Supreme court ruled in Google's favor in a decade long copyright case vs Oracle. The case argued two things, one, that APIs, a particular type of computer program designed for other programmers to hook into, in this case, Java, could not be copyrighted, and that, two, even if they could be, google's copying of some of oracles code to port Java support over to Android devices was "Fair Use," In other words, it used Oracles work to SUPPORT Googles work, rather than it being a straight rip off. The supreme court declined to rule on if APIs were copyrightable, but did state that, IF they are, then google's use was indeed fair use.

Why is this important for your business, assuming that you are neither google nor oracle? Well, Fair use is important to a lot of small businesses in their business activities. I'm not an attorney, and if you need to determine if your use of someones copyrighted work falls under fair use, please DO consult one. Functionally, if you produce content as part of your business activities, be it creative works that you sell, marking materials that you distribute, or even engineering product like chip designs and building blueprints, its almost certain that you did not create every element of that from scratch. Be it Fonts, stock images, designs of smaller components, references to other brands, products, and works, background music, you use other works constantly when you create creative works. Almost all of these other works are themselves under copyright, and, in theory, without a license to use them, you COULD be sued by the copyright holder for violating theirs. This is why restaurants don't sing "Happy Birthday" to patrons, but, rather, their own versions. Happy Birthday is itself copyrighted. The protection against this behavior is Fair use. If you use of the other work is, broadly speaking creative, doesn't use the original more than it has to, your work is more than just the copied sections and doesn't impact the market value of the original work too much, your use will generally be considered "Fair," and therefore not copyright infringement. The music industry has been pushing back against fair use for YEARS, and has been weakening these important protections. As such, an entire industry of "Copyright Trolls" has sprung up, where companies buy copyrights, sue people and businesses using the work, targeting those who can't afford to legally defend themselves, like small businesses, and try to make a profit from the lawsuits. While this ruling doesn't make this behaviour illegal, it is a general strengthening of fair use laws, giving your business additional ammunition in a court battle vs one of these entities, or indeed, any other copyright case. This is one of the first major rulings in favor of fair use in a long time, as the court system in general has soured on it in recent years, so it provides an important bastion against misuse of copyrights, setting an important precedent for protecting your business.

With that out of the way, let's continue our conversation from yesterday about Standard Operating Procedures, if you haven't listened to last episode yet, I do encourage you to pause, go back, listen to it, and come back here.

Ultimately, we've created our SOPs, but we now need to make sure they get followed, otherwise most of the value of SOPs goes out the window. The most important thing about SOPs is that they be VISIBLE. I've worked in a place that had fantastic, well written SOPs, and I and the author were the only ones who knew about them, because I found them when digging into records during my training. If they are in a binder on a shelf somewhere, that's no good. 

One, you need to present your SOPs to your employees at onboarding. Give them a binder with all the SOPs they need to do their job. Also create cheat sheets for their most commonly performed tasks, using those SOPs, that way they have one place to reference 60 or 80% of their job. That way the habit of following the SOP is easy for them to build. Then, you need to look at where you are storing your library of SOPs for the full business, and make sure that its accessible. There's a number of software programs, some industry specific, some more generalized, for doing exactly that, and, in some cases, automating the performance of some SOPs, like sending out emails according to specific rules and the like. Talk to your IT provider about getting this set up for you. You need to communicate the value, to your office employees, of doing things by the book, literally, and have it be habit that over on one monitor, you have your documentation management system, and on the other, you have your actual work. Speaking of, if you don't give your employees multiple monitors, you are missing out on a very cheap, very easy, significant boost to your employees productivity and performance. It's a way, for what, 200 dollars, to dramatically increase how much work any office employee gets done at your business, for the rest of their tenure there, and everyone should be doing it. Anyways, SOPs. Having a documentation system to store and centrally access your SOPS is important, but it doesn't solve problem for employees that already work for you, and are used to flying without them, nor does it fix the problem for employees who work in settings other than in front of a monitor all day. For the former, there's no way around it, this is going to be an adjustment period, but if you put in place a process to allow veteran employees to change a SOP themselves, it will help with a lot of the resistance. Bonus points if this process is itself a SOP. Explain to your employees the importance of using the SOPs, and run incentive programs for those using them. Finally, demonstrate how using a SOP can catch issues or mistakes that wouldn't be found otherwise. If you keep at it, and your managers keep at it, this transition can be done. For workers not in a white collar setting all the time, the cheat sheet approach may work better, along with signage, or the dreaded binder, depending on how frequently a task is performed and what proportion of your workforce it is subject to. You also DO need to be a bit more discerning in what you turn into a widely distributed SOP in more industrial settings, and what only gets used for training, as, when on their feet, people don't have as many opportunities to reference written materials safely and efficiently. Importantly, accessing your procedures should be low effort, and they need to be open when they are needed. An example of how you could do this in say, manufacturing would be with TVs above a production line displaying the SOP for producing and validating the current product, that switches when the line switches to other products, that way only the relevant SOP is displayed for reference at any given time. This could be paired with production metrics to help your shift supervisors keep their production quotas. Of course, the possibilities here are endless, and it varies a lot by industry. When I say that IT is more than just fixing the immediate problems that you come across, this is what I mean, this is something that you need to speak to your team on, to figure out what's possible, and how to most effectively disseminate information to your employees so that it actually gets listened to.

That's our show for today, thank you so much for listening. Tomorrow, catch us for a conversation about backups, and what risks a good system can help save you from. I will see you next time.