I write quite a bit during the year. I don't register everything. If I am writing something for a specific anthology, I don't register it. I write it. I edit it. I submit it. This constitutes the bulk of my writing. If it is going on my website or is a full manuscript, then I register. I have totaled it for a year. This year, so far, I have spent $105. Bother and expense? It takes fifteen minutes to register online and three months of doing something else waiting for the certificate to arrive. I am well aware of what registration does and does not do. One of the things it does is provide you with a leg to stand on should someone infringe upon your copyright. That date can matter very much. I'll share a story, in fact. About seven years ago, I wrote a rather detailed role playing game centered around organized crime in 1970 New York. It was just a little side project of mine, meant for fun rather than profit. But just the same, I had a website with detailed rules and a history. I decided to be cheap and send a copy of all of my IP to myself via registered mail (the "poor man's copyright" as some call it). Three months into my fun roleplaying bliss, I stumbled upon a website which had everything I had written. Some of it was modified ever so slightly, but not enough to change the fact that this is what I had published three months prior. I ignored it at first. Then I sent a letter to the website host asking him to take down the material that infringed on my copyright. I was told I needed to prove it was mine. About four months later, I received a certified letter from an attorney in Philadelphia. It insisted I remove all of the material from my website as it infringed upon the work of his client (the guy who ripped me off). So, I went to my cousin who is a lawyer. He sat me down with his colleague who did IP work. I had proof, after all. The original text was in a sealed envelope. By this point, this other guy had duplicated everything on my website. He registered it with the US Copyright Office claiming it as his own. He trademarked the name of my game. Mr. IP Lawyer tells me we can fight it. I'd likely win. After all, I have the originals in a sealed envelope that was sent certified mail. He sends a letter to the other attorney and we get a reply. They say they are going to tear the envelope apart in court. You can unglue an envelope, put anything you want inside and reglue it, they said. All of my original notes were stored electronically. Too easy to manipulate, so they don't prove anything. So I have two choices in the end. I could walk away and let the guy steal my intellectual property. Or, I can spend a lot of money fighting it. In the end, my entire defense is based on how secure a $1 envelope from Staples really is. I had to walk away. The guy who stole my work played my game a few times but didn't like a few things I had done with it. When I didn't incorporate his recommendations, he hijacked the whole thing. The lawyer's advice? Register anything you're afraid might get stolen. I'm not worried about short stories written for anthologies being stolen. I am mildly concerned about short stories going on my website being stolen. So I register those. I'm not concerned with my WIP being stolen. But I am concerned that my manuscript might escape my protection and fall into the hands of some twit who wants to put it on his blog. I know the limits of copyright registration. And I have gone far enough into the legal arena to try to defend my work. What it comes down to is that if you are absolutely paranoid about your work being stolen (even if that fear is unjustified) just register it. The fact that registration dates your work is not a downside. Dating is how your work is protected. When you file the registration, you can title the work "Project 621113" even if your book is being marketed under the title "Mary Goes to the Zoo." Let me just add, that I agree wholeheartedly with Cog's earlier statement (and the point of this thread). I cannot imagine an agent deciding to throw his/her career in the toilet by stealing work. If you are sending your manuscript to an agent whose career is ALREADY in the toilet, they may have nothing to lose. This speaks to why it is important to carefully select where you send your work. If you are soliciting reputable agencies, you should fear no danger.
Registration is no guarantee either. If you steal someone's work, you can register it as your own. A year later, the real author submits his work, and the publisher finds "your" story on a routine plagiarism search. The real author registers his work, and files suit against you. You registered first, so you win, right? No. The author, being the prudent type, has all his original notes and drafts, and presents them to the judge, who then asks you what kind of evidence you have to offer. You lose. Why did the author register before filing suit? Because that is the prerequisite for bringing the case to court.
The UK copyright service in its information pages also cautions against "Poor Man's Copyright", saying that it's impossible to prove that the envelope hasn't been steamed open and new contents inserted. However, while I won't recommend this as a good thing to do, I wonder if electronic services could help here. Let's say that you sent the file to yourself as an email to your Google mail account. The email then just sits there in your mailbox. If there is a question as to who created the file and when, then you can see the email (with full headers giving various times of receipt) on your gmail account. It would also be present in your sent items folder. In order to fake this, you'd need to hack Google, which is quite difficult. Then, if you sent the file to yourself not just to a Google account, but to a Hotmail one, and a number of other services, in order to have faked this, you would have had to hack ALL of these services. Quite tricky, and I don't think it would be considered plausible that anyone had managed this. I'm not saying that this replaces registration. But, for people who don't want to pay a copyright registration fee and are looking for whatever is the next best option, then this might be a candidate.
Nothing is a guarantee. Truth is, if someone wants to steal your work, they probably will. People cry plagiarism against famous authors all the time (usually because it is based on the same idea but executed differently.) And again, you are correct. You need to have the work registered in order to bring suit. If you are the prudent type, you also have your original notes. In my case, I had tons of original notes. But, since they were in electronic format, the lawyer didnt even want to touch them. And I already made my point about the envelope. If I have to sue someone, I want enough evidence to have the case thrown out in a summary judgment. I don't want trials. I register because I am seven years wiser and I have the means to sue someone into the ground if they ever try to pull that crap on me again. Oh, by the way, if I did take that original case to court and won, I wouldn't have been eligible to counter-sue for attorney fees. Registration is required to recover attorney fees. So even if I won, I would have lost.
Bull. Registration is required to take the case to court at all, and it really doesn't matter when. A publisher will typically register it on your behalf anyway upon acceptance for publication. But getting reimbursed for attorney's fees depends on the merits of the case, not on something as trivial as whether you were foolish enough to throw money into registration before there was a need for it. The primary accepted evidence for proof of ownership is possession of the material leading to the final product. Anyone who could do a credible job of faking it would not need to do so in the first place. Electronic records would have been fine, but if you had had printed drafts with revision marks, that would certainly have been better. As for the envelope (poor man's copyright), it is specifically excluded as evidence. See copyright.gov.
Don't plagiarism accusations promote book sales for well-known authors? That was true with Stephanie Meyer, especially as the judge dismissed the case. Idea infringement actually happens way too often and it really, really sucks for both parties, more so for the original inventor. I can relate to both sides of the issue. Whatever. Cut the damn baby in half. Publicity scandals do that for movies sometimes... depending on if it's a "cool" scandal or not, no? And plagiarism suits have to be substantially similar as a matter of law to be successful with the judge. Not as arbitrary as I thought it would be in most cases.
Where on the site does it specifically say this? All I see on the site is that it mentions there is no provision for that sort of thing in the Copyright Act itself. In my admittedly cursory research, I do not see a FRE relating directly to this issue, nor have I found a comparable state statute addressing the issue specifically. The fact that the 'poor man's copyright' may not be the best method to protect one's work, and may not be sufficient evidence in and of itself to prove all of the elements of a copyright infringement case is not the same as whether it is specifically excluded or allowed as evidence. Please provide a link to the specific portion of the copyright.gov site that gives us this information. I don't know why I am unable to find it there, and it seems like it would be an important point, particularly since in the FAQs, it does provide a specific mention of the 'poor man's copyright' issue. One would think they would make mention of it there.
Now we've more or less agreed that an agent and a publisher are highly, extremely unlikely to steal your work. So who else could? No one's gonna break into your flat just so they can steal your manuscript (they might've come to steal and sell your laptop, but it certainly wouldn't be for the writing material hidden within). So that leaves the internet. In short - don't put anything you ever want to eventually publish onto the internet. If you must put your work on the internet, make it a snippet that you wouldn't miss, and I'd certainly never put anything so precious onto a blog. I think if you wanna put something onto the internet, you're just gonna have to be ok with the fact that - someone, somewhere, is probably gonna steal bits and pieces of it. You'll probably never know about it either. Don't want that, don't post it online. Do you sometimes collect pretty pictures from google, or nice tunes from youtube, or bookmark a nice little article online? You think people don't do that to your writing too that you post online? Of course they do. If you wanna play it safe, I'd just never post anything in full online.
Yup. The people who steal work online aren't criminal masterminds. Invariably, they are idiots and half-baked losers trying to impress people with stolen writing that is as like as not crap to begin with. We've had our share of them show up here, only to be quickly and permanently banned. We've even had a couple crassly try to claim they were the injured party, in written arguments that showed far less intelligence and language skill than the writing in question. Be prudent, but don't get paranoid.
I can't help wondering about either your lawyer's expertise, or his interest in your case. The fact that you had not registered before your copyright was violated is irrelevant; you could have registered before filing suit. And the lawyer's lack of interest in your original notes seems, well, rather lazy. Sure, you could spend hundreds of hours faking up notes to take ownership of a game that's unlikely to make anyone a fortune, but is that really likely? Is the fact that evidence _could_ be faked really sufficient to throw that evidence out entirely?
Yep. You only get paranoid when you have something to hoard or hide. Don't post your secret babies online, smarties. Post for fun? Post to improve yourself? etc... Bottom line, everybody steals somehow. Copycats succeed at lyfe if they know how to make it seem "theirs", i.e. original, i.e. innovative. Edit: HOard/horde... hmmph
