Copyrights Secure Your Writing
Internet Writers Can Protect Against Plageurism
The digital age--it's easy for someone to steal your Internet or print freelance writing without permission. Find out how to copyright or register intellectual properties
Pay upwards of $150 to have your written creation or intellectual property copyrighted, or save those dollars and copyright it yourself. What should it cost? Anywhere from nothing to about $35, depending on your personal goals and needs and current U.S. Government copyright registration fees. Here’s how it works.
Copyright is unalienable right, if you author a work that exists in tangible form, according to the U.S. Government Copyright office. The right is linked to the Constitution, applying to published and unpublished works.
What You Can and Can't Copyright
Can't copyright
- an idea, or an intent
- your hopes for future projects or writing success
- snippets of dialog floating through your head as you showered this morning
- the outline of your next novel
- an email describing your latest plot
- anything written by the U.S. Government (anything authored by the government is public domain in the U.S.)
- a title
You probably can secure rights to
- original literary or written works
- musical works
- dramatic works
- pantomimes and choreographic works
- pictorial material
- graphic and sculptural works
- motion pictures and audiovisual works, sound recordings
And you can, the government notes, consider these categories quite broadly – seeing computer programs as literary works and maps or plans or blueprints as graphics. Web sites might qualify if everything you put on the site came from your creation, not from a template or borrowed code, scripts or graphics.
Rest assured the government sees any completed, tangible creation you author as copyrightable, if it is fixed in a copy or phonorecord and you can prove you created it. The definitions of copy and phonorecord are very broad. Proving you created it is simply, in many cases, a matter of committing the work to paper or a computer file and securing proof of a date.
How To secure a Copyright
Easy to do, in both cases. Take the paper document to the post office, buy a postage stamp for it and ask them to cancel the stamp on the document. Irrefutable proof that it at least existed on that date. Or mail the writing to yourself, label the envelope with title and details, and then file it, unopened, after your mail carrier delivers it to you. If the creation exists on a computer file, the software will date the original file the day you create it, and it will record each date that you alter it. Permanently copy the file, including date detail, to a CD, floppy, or DVD. Experts agree that will likely prove existence.
Your work, your creations, are automatically copyrighted, legally and forever more, the day you commit them to a copy or a phonorecord - whether you register them or not. But writers, especially freelancers may want to register your copyright with the Government Copyright Office for about $35. Most publishers do so because registration creates a public record of rights, and rights claimed, like First North American Serial, for example, can be specified.
If someone steals your work and you want to take to the courts, know this: The rules say you can’t defend an unregistered copyright in court. You can register your rights, at anytime after creating the piece, for a term of your lifetime plus 70 years. Registered or not, you can display the copyright symbol like this - © 2004 Jane Author - on your work.
Why Copyright Your Work?
Eugene R. Quinn, Jr, patent attorney and law professor, founder of IPWatchdog.com and of-counsel to Hiscock & Barclay, underlined, in a 2007 interview, the need to be reasonably concerned about ownership of your work. No need overreact and display the copyright symbol on work you’re submitting to a magazine or newspaper publisher. That's the mark of a rank amateur. But the writer’s path is long and arduous. Rewards are inconsistent, and your rights are precious.
Quinn says, “As Internet usage grows, new legal questions continue to surface, as do certain bitter and painful business realities. The sad but simple truth is that digital communications and the digitization of information of all types make the infringement of intellectual property rights, particularly copyrights and trademarks, easier than ever before. For support of this statement one need look no farther than the myriad of examples of copyright piracy that are plaguing the Internet.”
Any author can benefit from the few moments it takes to secure a copyright and peace of mind.
