Madeleine Key Image

Madeleine Key

Social Media Director

inventRight

Madeleine Key has been writing about intellectual property, inventing, and entrepreneurship for more than 15 years. As a ghostwriter, her work has appeared online in The New York Times, TIME, Forbes, Inc., Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Business Insider, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, The Globe and Mail, and more.

In 2015, she expanded and revised One Simple Idea, the bestselling how-to book about product licensing. With more than 800 5-star reviews on Amazon, it has been taught in numerous college courses, including the MBA program at the University of Fairbanks in Alaska; the University of California at Merced, and the University of the Pacific.

She is the longtime social media director for inventRight, the beloved coaching company, as well as the developer of its learning management system. In 2019, she helped create and administer “How to Launch a Product Without Starting a Business,” a 10-unit course for the University of Newcastle in Australia. To her knowledge, it is the first and only undergraduate course devoted wholly to product licensing.
As of 2021, she serves on the Communications Committee for the Center for Intellectual Property Understanding.

As a freelance journalist based in Oakland, her articles about arts and culture were featured in the SF Chronicle, East Bay Express, CALIFORNIA magazine, and on the website Civil Eats. She began writing for The Modesto Bee as a teen and cemented her interest in storytelling at The Daily Californian, UC Berkeley’s student newspaper.
Currently, she lives on the road in a built-out Sprinter van with her husband John and their Welsh Terrier Bear.

Recent Articles by Madeleine Key

Understanding IP Matters: Create, Invent, Track — Managing Digital Rights for IP and AI Value

If you don’t know how your intellectual property is being used, when, or by whom, you have little control over it — and are less likely to be paid. The field of digital rights management evolved from the need to track and protect how intangible property, specifically data and software, is accessed at scale. Today, innovative companies like Intertrust Technologies are using the technology to authenticate access and create digital value chains for copyrights, especially audio and visual content, and other assets.

Understanding IP Matters – IP and AI: Lessons for Students, Businesses and Governments

The use of generative and other forms of artificial intelligence is fueling challenging questions about AI’s relationship to IP rights. Businesses, investors, governments, lawyers and students all are learning as they go. What AI means to IP and how it can be regulated should be a part of every educator’s syllabus. How will students use AI to help them learn? Will the datasets that are being used to train popular AI tools be transparent and accessible? Will these datasets continue to use copyrighted works without compensating copyright owners? If that is the case, copyrights may never be the same, nor trade secrets nor patents, for that matter.