Literary-Agents.info

Copyright

When writers start sending their work out to literary agents they tend to get worried about the possibility of agents (or their assistants) spotting the potential of their work and stealing it to pass off as their own. Lots of writers therefore worry about getting copyright over their work. There are a lot of ways to "register" your work, but up until a few months ago I'd have said not to bother with any of them. The fact is that you own the rights over any work you create as soon as you record it (usually by writing it down). So (contrary to popular belief), you don't actually have to register your work with anybody in order to have the legal rights over it.

So paying to register a work you already own the rights to seemed a total waste of money – especially when the chances of somebody stealing an unpublished work seem so incredibly slim (have you ever heard of a case of copyright infringement that involved an unpublished book?). So what's the actual value of registering your work supposed to be? The point is apparently to confirm the date at which you created your work, so that you can prove it in Court at a later date if necessary. I didn't really buy that. Why the hell should I have to pay to register something I already own? Isn't that like paying to register the contents of my house, in case I get burgled? I had computer files with dates of when they were created. I was pretty sure I could prove when I created the work if I wanted to.

Then I got a bit of a shock. I was going round the internet the other day looking at sites about literary agents, when I came across a site that sounded kind of similar... it didn't take me long to realise that some SOB had just copied and pasted my site into his own, and was passing it off as his! Now I don't make any money out of this site (I tell a lie... I got $50 off amazon after carrying their ads for about two years... WOW), so it's not like I'm losing out financially, but it kind of ticked me off. It's not even like I got the credit. And if my work was worth stealing, wasn't it worth paying for?

I wrote to the guy and demanded he took my stuff off his site. He told me to get stuffed. He reckoned that once something was online it was in the public domain and it was fair game. He told me not to be such a fascist(!). I checked up and this is BS. Publishing something online is no different to publishing it in a book and you still have the same rights over it – you can't just go online and steal it. The guy just said he wrote it and it was his. I showed him my original Word files showing the date at which I wrote it, but he sent back Word files with the same content which (to my confusion) apparently pre-dated mine.

That messed me up. I asked a techie friend how this could happen, and he said there were a number of ways of doing it, and it wasn't really difficult. The guy could have just got an old Word file and overwritten it with my material – it would still show the original date of creation, which could have been years ago. The date of creation is therefore meaningless – what matters is the date last modified (and if you're regularly editing a document you created two years ago, that date could be yesterday, even though the document is much older), but even this is easy to fake. You can just manually change the date on your computer and make it look like you created a document a decade ago.

I used this trick to make it look like I'd written the document even earlier and not modified it since, and told the guy I'd found an earlier version of the file. At this point he seemed to lose interest in the argument and just got rid of the stuff from his site – but it made me realise just how flimsy my "evidence" of ownership was – and it also made me realise that, much to my surprise, the chances of someone stealing my work weren't as far-fetched as I'd thought.

I asked a lawyer friend what he thought and he said the "registration" services being offered would probably be effective in providing evidence of ownership, but he also agreed that the chances of actually having your work stolen by an agent – honest or otherwise – was extremely slim (if not unheard of). I agree that submitting something to an agent is a whole different kettle of fish to sticking something online for all to see, but after the bad taste in my mouth from the previous episode I was beginning to think it was worth it. OK, so maybe no-one has ever had their work stolen from submitting it to agents, but it's not like there are any prizes for being first. And while it may be less likely that someone will steal my book than the contents of my website, it would be about a million times worse. 

My friend told me he wasn't an expert in IP law (intellectual property law – the area of law covering copyright) and that I should talk to a specialist. He gave me a phone number, and you know what? The fee for consulting this guy was more than the cost of the registration itself. So I figured I might as well just get on with it and do it (for the site and my book). A part of me thinks I'm a sucker for paying for something I'll almost certainly never need (in the case of the book, anyway... the website copyright protection was more justified, under the circumstances), but I try and look at it like insurance. I think of all the hundreds (thousands?) I've paid out for car insurance over the past God-knows how many years without having a smash, and the money I've paid for protecting my copyright suddenly seems insignificant.

That's my justification, anyway. At least I can stop thinking about it now. In the end I went with a copyright registration service offered by a team calling themselves the "Intellectual Property Rights Office". Don't be fooled by the name, though – it's not some official government agency, or anything, just a run-of-the-mill business with an important-sounding name (which is good, because when I say I'm registered with them it sounds like it has a lot more weight than it really does). I went with them because it's international, and it's all done quickly and easily online. My friend said that for people in the US he thought registering with the US Copyright Office was better, because it's more official and he thinks it might give you some statutory benefits, but that obviously applies to the US only, and I think you have to mess around with a load of paper forms and sending off hard copy of your work, instead of just uploading it online. I think it also takes about 6 months to process the application, as opposed to the online registration, which is instant.