This caught my eye today at the store. As you can see they are $3.99 and Mint Chocolate. It reminded me about a lot of online business models of having a low-cost or free version of their product and have a “premium” version.

I experimented with this Free and Premium business model on PinoyTattoos.com where I offered free Baybayin translations for names and charged for non-names. I think it was pretty successful as I was able to do away with the free product. With the only free product being the blog, I think I need another free product to give back to the community.

One of my favorite talks of the day was presented by Stephen O’Grady at Wordpress Wordcamp SF 2008.

During my recent event, my friend who I shared the booth with had a conversation with a gentleman who was from a group of artists. He was mentioning how they wanted to change up their website because people were stealing their tattoo designs. Right now if you right click to save an image, you get some 1997 javascript pop-up that’s supposed to prevent you from using the right click button on your mouse. Any modern browser such as Firefox will allow you to download images.

While I understand the need to protect your work, you need to understand that you don’t own your content – everyone does. What do I mean? Unless your going to keep all your precious work in a closet, someone will be able to copy it and do as they wish with it and you can’t do anything about it. The record companies tried to keep a lock on their data with DRM and failed miserably.

This is especially true if your an online business or you primarily use the web to market you goods. The public will use their brains and technology to take your stuff.

Here are some things you can to do react to this truth:

• Watermark your product – stick a graphic overlay with your logo over images
• Create a premium product
• Give up and give it away for free and hope people will donate
• Think of another business model