COPYRIGHT

Similarly, since the industry thrives upon verbal pitches to numerous unscrupulous development executives, you can assume that if they find ideas they like but not writers, they will take those ideas and suggest them to their favourite writers. Until you become one of their favoured writers then you will just have to suck it up.

What there is a law against though, is the stealing of other people's work. The law in nearly all countries says that you cannot put your name on other people's work and claim it as your own. Consequently, as soon as you have started writing something you are covered by copyright legislation. You do not need to register, you do not need to have a lawyer take note of when you started writing it, you merely need to begin writing.

To help prove your case in a law court however, people have found that it is useful to have their work independently verified as having been in existence at a certain time. To help with this the Writers Guild of America, and also the Writers Guild of Great Britain, among other institutions, have developed script registration services. Usually, for a small fee, they will take delivery of a script from you, register it as being delivered at a certain date and they will securely store the script for a certain number of years. Similarly, the US Library of Congress operates such a scheme, offering storage for a much longer period.

You can use these services, or the services of a Lawyer and a Bank Safety Deposit Box, to much the same effect.

If you do find yourself confronted by a work that bares a close similarity with your own however, none of these precautions really work unless the work is word for word the same, which is unlikely. So further to the above precautions it is recommended that you maintain a record of everyone who has seen your work, and preferably have a dated letter of solicitation from them mentioning the work in question. Then if they produce something similar without crediting you, you might have a case against them.

Now here is the good news, it is very rare. There have been a few proven cases where people have submitted other people's scripts as their own, and there have been cases where people have stolen the basic story idea from other people's scripts without crediting them. There are also cases of characters and situations being lifted from other scripts and used without sufficient disguise to create a good case for compensation, but over all, most cases of plagiarism come to the conclusion that although ideas may be similar, many people have similar ideas.

That is why ideas, and even titles, are not copyrighted. Titles however can be Trademarked. So, for instance, if you wish to call your next script "Star Wars", you would not be sued for breach of copyright, but for transgressing the Registered Trademark regulations. If Hans Solo appeared in your script however, then copyright regulations would also apply.

If however, you wrote a story about a cynical rocket ship pilot being co-opted on a mission to rescue a feisty princess, you would probably get away with it. If the law did not allow this, then spoofs and satires on popular fictions would not survive.

Genre fiction is nothing, if not a copy of a basic model derived from a popular original work, and huge swathes of the industry merely rehash old ideas in slightly different forms.

If you want more information on copyright try the US copyright office or The Canadian Intellectual Property Office. The information that you will gain there is pretty much the standard deal that you will get anywhere else. There are a few local differences. You have slightly better protection in Europe, but it does not apply world-wide but then nothing does. Globalisation, which so many protest against, is spreading copyright legislation world wide and so it is becoming harder for China, for instance, to merely translate everything into Chinese and not pay any royalties.

If you would like to register your script with the Writers Guild of America then you can do it on-line at the http://www.wga.org They charge you a small fee and it gives you a date stamped file that can be used to prove when you wrote whatever you wrote. There are other ways of proving when you wrote something, though this way is recommended - naturally - by the Writers Guild.  You can also try e-TimeStamp - the electronic Internet notary which puts an electronic signature on any file you care to stamp that way. It is also very cheap, if not quite recognised as yet.

Other than that, you send copies of your script to The WGA - West, and/or The Library of Congress.

Strangely, however, the more people who see your script and hear you personally pitching your ideas, the better it is for you because you have witnesses. So although publicly displaying anything on a web site is not going to help you maintain a paper connection to all those who see your material, if enough people know what it is, they are more likely to let you know when they find someone else has stolen it. Even so, a paper record of readers and an acceptable date stamp is recommended.

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