dj, we know it doesn't work because it DOES get rejected in court. Every time. I've read about cases (I can't recall the particulars) of writers who tried to use poor man's copyright in court and they lost. It simply doesn't hold up as evidence. THAT is why industry pros tell writers it's useless. Because it WILL get rejected as evidence. Your suggestion of beta readers, that's probably better. Notes and drafts that can be ink-dated might be able to work too (I'm not a lawyer, btw!). But if writers think they can just mail or email copies to themselves and think that alone will hold up in court in the unlikely event that there's a copyright dispute, they're kidding themselves. It won't hold up.
The very best way to avoid the problem in the first place is prevention. Don't post any of your work online. Don't use display sites. Don't give it to someone you don't know or have reservations about. By that alone, you've reduced the odds of someone stealing your work to virtually zero. And kept your first publishing rights out of dodgy territory.
I'm not sure what you mean by rejected. I see no reason why this would be inadmissible as evidence of authorship. There is nothing inherently wrong with it from a legal standpoint. Whether it would be factually persuasive is an entirely different question, that's really up to a jury.
The myth behind the Poor Man's Copyright seems to be that mailing yourself a copy of the work confers some right upon the author that did not exist before the mailing, or that mailing oneself a copy is functionally the same as registering the copyright. This is not true. The copyright vests at the creation of the work. You don't have to register it to be protected. You don't have to put a copyright symbol on it. You just have to create it and the right is automatic. Mailing the thing to yourself has no legal significance.
Maybe that's what I'm failing to communicate. I'm looking at it as an intellectual exercise, like a law school exam, rather than as a practical matter. I think the myth is that the mailing is a legally significant gesture. It is not, but it does provide (potentially impeachable) evidence of a particular fact.
In a situation where a party had mailed himself a copy of his work, and his possession of the manuscript on the date of the postmark was at issue, I don't see any reason why he couldn't introduce the sealed envelope as evidence of his possession of the manuscript on the date of the postmark. Since the registered envelope is subject to tampering, it could certainly be faked. The opposing party would bring this up on cross examination, and possibly call some kind of witness to testify about how easy it would be to create a fake registered letter. But the mailing would probably be admissible, legally, even if it isn't compelling evidence.
As to the question of whether mailing yourself a copy of your work protects you, obviously the answer is that it doesn't do much. To the extent the fact-finder trusts the envelope, it establishes the party's possession of the work on the date of the postmark. The e-mail through Google establishes the same fact: possession of the manuscript on a particular date. The e-mail is much more tamperproof than the envelope, is better evidence because it's harder or impossible to fake.
The service provided by this website is no different than the e-mail, and no different in what it ostensibly proves than the poor man's copyright through registered mail. This website may be relatively more trustworthy than the easily-falsified envelope, but I don't see any factual reason to trust these people more than Google. As I and others have pointed out, if the issue of authorship is in dispute, most authors will have plenty of evidence of authorship created in the regular writing process (drafts, submission records, testimony of people who read the author's work).
None of these methods are a substitute for registering the copyright. But even if you register the copyright, that isn't likely to answer most common factual scenario in a plagiarism/manuscript theft case, because the stolen version will likely be changed enough to make the issue a question of whether the disputed work is actually infringing, rather than a dispute over authorship.
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