Plagiarism
Imported, and slightly cleaned up, from
another thread:
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Don't worry about scam agents pirating your works.
The only possible thing they could do with your manuscript would be sell it to a publisher -- and we know they won't do that, right? If they knew how to sell manuscripts to publishers they wouldn't need to be scammers.
I'm not a lawyer, and I don't play one on TV.
That being said:
Among the elements of proof in a copyright infringement you'll find "access." Independent creation is a defense against the allegation.
So, for someone to win a copyright infringement suit, you'll not only have your original materials, you'll have your correspondence with that individual.
Now it happens that
plagairism does exist. For example: Ron Montana's
Death in the Spirit House was plagiarized by Craig Strete, who published it as his own.
Death in the Spirit House was eventually reprinted under Ron's name as
Face in the Snow. In this case, however, it was an attempted collaboration gone horribly wrong -- WGA, mailing a copy to yourself, copyright registration, none of that would have helped, hindered, or made a darned bit of difference.
That's the only case that comes to mind in the past twenty years from the world of print fiction of an unpublished work being plagiarised.
Dawn Pauline Dunn and Susan Hartzell plagiarized
Phantoms by Dean Koontz for two of their books,
Crawling Dark and
Demonic Color. In that case,
Phantoms was already published, so prior existence wasn't hard to prove, and available for sale, so access wasn't hard to prove either.
One more
plagiarism suit, this one from 1997:
Janet Dailey copied from
Nora Roberts; again this involved already-published books.
There have been whacko cases, of course. A
lady who claimed that J. K. Rowling copied from her self-published children's books (thrown out of court when it was shown that the plaintiff had manufactured evidence). A lady from New Jersey who claimed that Stephen King had copied her unpublished manuscripts (by reading them through her window while flying by in his airplane) in a case that never made it to court.
Most
plagiarism cases involve previously printed books, whose contents are lifted in whole or in part for unpublished works. Don't worry about it; just don't copy from someone else's book in your own.
This is without going into derivative works -- using another writer's characters and settings for your own work. No matter how much I like
The Lord of the Rings I can't write my own fourth volume. That isn't, strictly speaking, plagiarism.
So ... until you're published, forget it.
On why you might not want to copyright your works before you start sending them around: Say you copyright your manuscript, and start the dance. It sells a year from now. It's scheduled for two years later. So you have a book coming out in 2007 with a 2004 copyright date on it. People spotting it on the shelves for the first time might think it was an old book. Or -- do you want the first editors who come to your novel to know how long it's been batting around the slushpiles of New York?
(I remember one that I saw in the early nineties that had a 1967 copyright on its title page. (I read that one all the way through, each page lifting my eyebrows a little bit higher, as I realized
why it hadn't sold in the intervening 25 years. No, I'm not going to tell you the plot, lest the author be here and be embarassed, but I promise you, if I told you, you too would say "Yeah, I see why that one never sold."))
So -- "Poor Man's Copyright" is an urban legend. WGA registration is worthless in print publishing (for all that it might be useful in the world of screenplays). Real, live copyright is of marginal utility, and might do you more harm than good in the print world.
Put it out of your mind. Having your work stolen isn't the first or second thing that you should be worrying about when you're submitting your book.
