Let's say for example, if I were to self publish a poetry collection and print one copy, can I then get all the poems in that copy a legal, 100% legit copyright? To where if those poems show up anywhere without my consent then lawsuit and all of that? I'm really worried about plagerism. I have my collection complete and organized after 5+ years and I want all of the poems Copyright to my name before I send them in to magazines or try to find an agent. How can I do that? And please to save both your time and mine, don't go on a diatribe about the likelyhood of my work getting stolen.
Copyright, not copywrite Its your copyright as soon as you write it... if you're in the US you can register your Copyright which gives you more ability to sue for iP violation under federal law (Paging @Steerpike for detail on that since i'm in the Uk) I would not advise self publishing them if you want to trad publish as that would mean that the firsr rights would be gone, and make it far harder to get a deal. in terms of actual violation, there's a vanishingly small chance of plaigarism, ie another poet portraying your work as their own , but there is a significantly higher chance of copyright violation in the work being sold or give away without your permission... the problem with enforcing your copyright in those circumstances comes when the transgresor is in china, or the ukraine, or transdneister (anywhere outside federal jursidiction)... its easy enough to get a judgement against but harder to enforce said judgement
I don't know for sure - i think you can register the copyright of the collection as a whole, but again Steerpike is going to be better placed to answer that being both a lawyer and american
As big soft moose has already commented, your work is copyrighted as soon as you write it, and the copyright is more or less valid unless you do something to put the work in the public domain. As an example, I'm in the U.S. and I'm a Jeep hobbyist. Some time ago I put in a considerable amount of work on a book about Jeep Cherokees -- and then the project head at the publisher left, the publisher then decided they wanted more of a photo book rather than words, and the whole thing came to a screeching halt. But, on occasion questions come up on a Jeep forum I frequent, and the best way to answer some of the questions is to copy and paste sections from my manuscript. Posting something like that on a public forum without a copyright notice is, as I understand it, putting it in the public domain. So, each and every time I copy and paste from my old manuscript, I make certain to include a notice that the work is copyrighted, and that by posting it I do not grant anyone permission to copy it or to disseminate it. In the U.S., to perfect a copyright we have to submit a form to the Library of Congress, pay a fee (the number $65 sticks in my brain, but it might have been $45), and send the Library of Congress two copies of the "best edition" of the work. So if you issued a book in paperback, hard cover, e-book and audio book, I would view the hard cover edition as the "best" -- so you would have to send two copies of the hard cover edition to the Library of Congress. Sending the form to the Library of Congress doesn't create the copyright, it registers the copyright -- which makes it orders of magnitude easier to sue in the event of a copyright infringement. But, by submitting the form, you are agreeing to also submit two "best version" copies of the work, so if you submit the form but don't follow up with the two physical copies -- your copyright won't be registered. I don't think you need to copyright each poem individually. In reality, as individual works each IS copyrighted individually but, if you publish them in a book, the asserting your copyright for the book effectively copyrights everything that's in the book. If you are in the U.S., go the the web site for the Library of Congress and read their information on registering copyrights,.
