Wayfarer;

It all depends of what kind of company you are starting. If you are out for the first time in business, the model with depend on your product, your market and your time to market.

Some general guidelines are: Don''t form anything until you''ve got a deal or sales imminent. Two, if you have anything in the product like intellectual property -- something you thought up and or designed, take these steps:

1. Ask somebody you know and trust if they know an attorney they trust. Then, talk to them. Listen to their advice. More than likely, unless you are ready to roll something out now, and there is clear evidence there is demand for it in spite of the competition, as a good product should have, they will tell you quite rightly to come back when you have something that is ready to run.

2. If you are starting a business to establish brand presence and expand it, start small and inexpensive, because it will take you quite a long time to get any brand recognition out of time unless you have a hit under your belt ready to go. I have been writing for 20 years, and am still a proprietor. If a million dollar deal comes along, I may incorporate, I may not. As a writer and designer, I don''t have huge infrastructural or staffing requirements, so I work out of my home office most of the time. There are a lot of tax benefits to that here above silicon valley.

If you are a programmer, and have something compiled and ready to burn release copies and ship, write out a document of when the idea occured to you, how long you worked on it, detail the development process, and basically document how you brought it into existance, and then bring that letter and the program to the attorney and claim authorship, and leave the first copy with them. I cannot overstate that this be an attorney well trusted by several well informed and trustworthy professionals.

Then register it with the Writer''s Guild of American, then register the document itself on a form TX to the Registrar of Copyrights in Washington. Take copies of these registrations and supplement your original documentation to the attorney.

Then, work out the next phase of operations with a little confidence that there is a professional witness out there willing to bring suit on your behalf because they absolutely know it is yours, and they will get their fees out of the party that violates your intellectual property. Copyright violations is one of the most winnable cases in tort law, especially whey you have covered your back.

Most of all, remember that your copyright protection is who you tell you idea to. Loose lips do sink ships, and a non-disclosure agreement is only as safe as the person who signs it. Without more details on exactly what you are doing, it is impossible to give you any viable advice accounting for the individual facts in your unique circumstance. If you want to post back with some general ideas about what you have going on, without giving the baby out with the bathwater, I can maybe help you a little more.

Art

Ad astra per aspera - it's a hard road to the stars