Top Four Questions About Copyright (with Answers)

St. Louis Writers Guild today hosted Mark Sableman, attorney from the offices of Thompson & Coburn, who discussed publishing contracts and copyright law. He answered many questions and cleared up a lot of myths about copyright. I'm passing along his answers to four of the most-asked questions:

1. At what point in writing something can I claim a copyright?
As soon as you write it on paper or save it on your computer's hard drive it is copyrighted in your name. This is called "fixed expression in a tangible medium."

2. How can I best protect my written work so nobody steals it -- or if they do, I can sue them?
File a copyright form, Form CO, from copyright.gov, and upload your text; online filing will cost $35. Filing by postal mail is more complicated and higher-priced. Do it within the first 90 days after completing a work and then, if you someday have to sue for infringement, you may collect money (statutory damages) -- if you can prove they actually did it and that it caused you to lose money. You can't sue for damages just because they used your work without permission.

3. Can I legally prove my copyright by mailing myself a copy of my text?
No. Absolutely not. That's an old myth.

4. How long before my copyright expires?
This law has changed this several times, but currently, it's the author's life plus 70 years.

Stealing Prose

Author-friend's nonfiction prose article was published by a good litmag about 15 years ago.

Long before that, pre-Internet, the mag, without authors' permissions, had agreed to allow its contents to be republished in a lit-crit series sold to libraries. This series was later sold to a database, which allegedly "licensed" the article for use on a website -- one that caters to lazy or dishonest students, providing downloadable research papers, articles, bibliographies, and so on. The author was stunned to find the article there, priced at $6.99.

Author contacts this Plagiarism-R-Us website. Meets with arrogance and refusal to remove

the work. Database which allegedly "licensed" the article ignores Author's phone call and letter. Author contacts website's apparent ISP, which says it isn't the site's ISP. Nevertheless, after months, article is finally removed.

Author learns that although the copyright reverted to the author after publication, unless it was then specifically registered with Library of Congress, the author's right to this individual article is essentially theoretical. And it's highly unlikely damages could be recovered, for example, in court.

Screenwriters have a union. Songwriters have a union. For freelance writers there’s a National Writer’s Union offering legal advice and grievance assistance to members ($120/year) -- but how many editors would cheerfully “Hire a Union Writer!”? The Author’s Guild offers members ($90/year) much the same support, plus health-insurance deals, but no self-published authors are allowed.

Now read this again and underline every snag, snafu, artificial difficulty, loophole, clusterf---, and cryin’ shame in this true story about our profession.

Stealing Poetry

True story from out East: Poet's chapbook is published by a good chapbook press. Has a terrific poem in it that a high-school girl types up as her own and submits to young-people's poetry contests, such as Scholastic's. She wins top prize in THREE contests and $5000. Prizes help her get into a high-prestige school and rev up to become a writer.

Then the little scamp is found out. Publisher can't sue because after publication the rights to the poems reverted to the author. Poet hasn't got a legal leg to stand on: poet did not register a Library of Congress copyright for the individual poem, and probably couldn't have afforded to, at $35 (electronic) or $45 (on paper) fee per poem, a serious artificial difficulty. From the thief they got a written confession (to show her college dean!) and a promise to pay the prize money back to the prize-givers, and that is all.

This is not even an Internet-theft story! It would have been easy and quick to catch such a thief on the Internet; just Google! Want to protect what you have on the Net? Stamp it with your choice of one of the licenses available free from Creativecommons.org.

Stuff you printed, that isn't online -- what this story shows is THAT is now the thing to sweat about!

Granted that this story is a very unusual one, because the poem made money. And it is one of only three poetry-theft stories that I have personally heard about in the past 30 years.