September 9, 2019
Worried about Copyright? You’re Wasting Your Time
Part of evolving as a writer (and a person) is to learn from silly past mistakes. Another way to learn, more subtle, is to learn from your silly past preconceptions. Writers worried about copyright is a great such example.
Just in case it’s not clear, let me be explicit about it. If you’re worried about copyright – and authors typically worry about someone stealing their idea – you’re wasting your time. Completely.
(Hey, everything looks better with a cat photo)
There are several factors behind this. You might be familiar with some, not so with others. Motivation for this article came after someone in an online discussion (elsewhere, not on Home for Fiction), asked for help with their novel, but was reluctant to supply information. Why? You guessed it: they were afraid others (me?!) would steal their idea.
What Is It You Worry about when You’re Worried about Copyright?
The ending of the previous section briefly explained what it is that authors fear when they’re worried about copyright. They fear someone will take their idea and rush to write a book with it. So, let’s get this out of the way.
You can’t copyright ideas.
In other words, it’s perfectly possible (and legal) for you to write a book about some children who go to a special school where there’s magic. Legal problems begin only if you, say, named your protagonist Larry Otter, and copied scenes and plot lines.
Even then, you could still get away with it if you presented it as a parody. Just ask “Don Brine” (Adam Roberts; I’ve met him at an academic conference, great guy) and his book The Va Dinci Cod.
But few authors do it. Why? Because, first of all, it’s a really petty, classless thing to do. You’d be rightly ridiculed if you tried to do such a thing (unless it were a parody).
But there is another, more important reason.
Authors only Care about Their Own Work
The truth is, I don’t care about your work (in the sense that I don’t care about appropriating it). I expect you to, similarly, not care about my own literary production. Authors want need to express their own ideas.
Let’s perform a fanciful thought experiment.
Let’s assume you travel back in time and discover, say, Bram Stoker’s Dracula just before the author submitted the manuscript to his publisher. You erase poor Bram’s name and add your own.
Fast forward to today, and you are the author of Dracula, not Bram Stoker. Everyone says you’re great, they praise you to no end. Only thing is, you know the truth.
It’s eating you alive, you know you’re an impostor. Not to mention, you probably fail to produce anything as great ever againIn fact, Bram Stoker never did either, but that is irrelevant!.
The reason some authors are worried about copyright is that they have a flawed sense of what a novel really is. Furthermore, this is invariably connected to experience.
A Novel Is more than just a Collection of Ideas
At the beginning of this post, I implied that there is an experience factor involved in our topic. In other words, I implied that it’s mostly inexperienced authors that are more worried about copyright.
The reason is that such authors, more than others, think of novels in terms of plot. That is, they place excessive emphasis in plot, not characters, style, or authorial voice.
In this (flawed) framework, authors become worried about copyright because they fail to realize there is much more in a novel than a plot. Chaotic plots are fanciful and “original”I assign a negative connotation to original here, hence the quotation marks. Authors might think their plot is original in a good way, but too wild a plot is usually a sign of narrative incoherence. for a reason: they rarely work!
“So, Should I Be Worried about Copyright or not?”
No, you shouldn’t worry about copyright. Yes, you should still state your copyright on anything you publish or put online (unless of course if you intend it to be in the public domain).
Whenever you have produced a finished narrative and have published it (be it a post on a blog, a novel on Amazon, or any other publicly available text), stamp a copyright mark on it with your name and date.
At the same time, anything that precedes that stage is not worth worrying about. If you have a partial manuscript that is, say, 70% ready, you can simply put the copyright information as I explained, and that’s enough.
But, for goodness’ sake, if someone asks you “So, what’s your next book about?” and you’re reluctant to say because you fear they’ll steal your idea, there’s something fundamentally wrong with your thought process and, more importantly, your narrative.
5 Comments
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You are correct. Ideas can’t be copyrighted; everyone except very new writers should know this. Your execution of an idea IS covered by copyright the instant you write it.
I register my copyrights, not because I think someone will steal my work, but for a simple reason: when Amazon asked me to prove I was the owner of my own writing, years after the book was published, it saved a lot of time to be able to point them to the Library of Congress listing, and to send them a copy of the registration.
I value my time as it’s hard to get, and my brain doesn’t work well much of the time. Proving ownership, when Amazon was threatening to remove my novel, otherwise would have taken days of work. It was worth every penny to register: we had just gone through a major move, and I couldn’t find alternate forms of proof.
Interesting to hear about Amazon. I was once asked about a book that contained some excerpts from my blog, but merely replying to their email and stating I owned the blog in question was enough.
Might I ask whether there was anything particular about your book that, you think, may have prompted Amazon to react to it that way (and years later)?
I have no idea; what I DO know is that I felt a lot of panic. We had everything in boxes and I couldn’t breathe (not as if it were selling well, but just one more thing to deal with on top of chronic illness, no time to work on the second book in the trilogy, and the knowledge that I was at the mercy of the great ‘Zon).
I’ve since read that many people have gotten this email, sometimes because someone else complained that they didn’t own the work (there are plenty of scammers out there), and that it was hard to prove they were the rightful owners.
I remember how easy it was, relatively speaking compared to digging through packed records, to just send them the link and the scan of my registration.
I wish they had a place where, if you’re uploading a book to Amazon for the first time, you could put this information in if you had it, but the issue doesn’t come up often because most people don’t register their ebook-only works with the Library of Congress.
Maybe they just check randomly. Who knows!
It was also a book it had taken me fifteen years to write.
And Amazon is often opaque – their business model is based on bulk and on being able to run most things with algorithms rather than human supervision.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing!