protecting your ideas

There is no way for you to prevent someone from stealing your ideas or stopping an 10 mile wide asteroid from hitting the earth, so forget about it.

Rest assured that your idea is not as hot as you think it is and for every great idea you have, we got one too.

Hell, I got two!

There are copyright threads here on the boards that can give you the straight poop. Do a search for copyright.

You can't copyright ideas. And yes, anyone can steal your ideas. But execution is entirely something else. Many people have good ideas but they can't execute them.

I personally would care less about your ideas. I have a million of my own.

Once you put something on paper (or in a computer file), it's copyrighted. To prove it is something else -- and there were discussions on that already.

0.02 worth

An often-raised topic, which inevitably generates a range of conflicting answers!

There are those who argue that as soon as you've written something it's automatically copyrighted and you are the undeniable author, but of course until you register the material in some form, you can't legally prove you're the author if the need arises.

The way I've heard it explained, WGA registration is intended for WGA members who require arbitration. I don't know whether there's been any instances of WGA supplying proof of authorship whenever a non-member required this. (Anyone who knows more, feel free to chip in.) WGA is certainly willing to take your 20 bucks per script, surely this can't just be for the privilege of storing your script in their database for 5 years? Registering with Library of Congress is failsafe but it can take a while (months?) to receive the copyright notice, if that matters.

You can't protect an idea, only your execution of that idea. But, let's be honest here, the chances of your having an idea so wonderful and original that someone would wish to steal it and work with it are even less than your chances of winning the Martian Lottery. Sorry, but that's just how things are. When people say there are no fresh ideas, that everything's been done, I believe them.

You also might also consider the extremely high probabality that a thief who steals someone else's story idea is probably so profoundly lacking in writing talent that they couldn't do a damn thing with it anyway.

Me, I'm too busy trying to convert my own ideas into scripts and stories to even contemplate the merest possibility of stealing something from you, and I'll bet all serious writers feel the same way. Have courage, mon ami.

Oh, for what it's worth, I regard posting work-in-progress script pages, loglines, synopses, etc. on message boards as a form of temporary copyright stamp. Until it scrolls into oblivion in x number of months from now, it's reasonable proof that I own the material. Sure, maybe that won't stand up in a court of law if worst comes to worst, but I can sure as hell embarrass the pants off anyone boorish enough to plagiarize or otherwise pass my ideas and stories off as their own. Ditto for posting material on a website, my ISP can confirm upload date and time for any chosen file and will verify content if required. What the hey, every little thread of assurance helps.

Comments welcome.

-Derek
Derek's Web Page - stories, screenplays, novels, insanity.

WritingFool said:

I want so much to post my Hook, to see what type of response it would generate from all y'all nice people.

Click to expand...

Since you can't protect an idea - I think you gotta use a little judgement when putting your stuff out there in such a way that the entire world has access to it.

The issue is not copyright - because you cannot copyright an idea. Actually there is far less risk with posting actual pages, than simply revealing your concept in a sentence or two.

For me - posting a story idea simply to hear what other people think of the idea - is not a good enough reason to take the risk of having it out there. This is primarily because whatever feedback you get will not be helpful to you. A story's potential lies in the execution - not just the idea.

If you're posting to get help writing your logline or query that's another matter entirely. As you need a solid logline, synopsis and query to market your work - so there's a benefit to doing so.

As stated, you can't copyright an idea. Just the execution. A case in point:

The Ashley Judd movie Normal Life and the Bruce Campbell movie In The Line Of Fire: Blaze of Glory.

Both were based on a supposedly true story about a cop who falls in love with a manic/depressive woman; in order to make her happy, he ends up quitting the force and turning to bank robbery to give her the life she wants. There's a tragic twist to this story which I won't spoil for those who haven't seen either film.

At any rate, the stories in these two flicks are the exact same; the set ups, the plot points, the inciting incidents, the whole sha-bang. They're basically identical, and were released just shy of a year apart -- Normal Life was a (limited) cinematic release while Blaze of Glory was made for TV.

The DIFFERENCE, however, is in their respective executions. They don't share the same dialogue, they don't share the same scene progression, names are different, etc. So despite the stories themselves being pretty much identical, it's how the story was told in each which is different.

I think Boo is touching on something here, if this individual were to in fact steal this incredible idea of yours and literally take the exact story to a producer etc then you would have a very strong case.

But, for this to happen it would mean that this individual can execute a well written screenplay which leads me to believe they might have a few ideas of their own they would want to incorporate as well as some name changes. Hell, they might even cut a scene or two.

If you really break down the profile of an individual who would do something like this the odds of it actually happening (for you to be watcing Lost on t.v and see your screenplay there in between the commercials with a NOW PLAYING title ending your nightmare) are very very slim.