To my amazement, the Myth Which Will
Not Die has again reared its head at one of the handful of writing
sites I visit often.
Can't I just mail (or email) a copy
of my novel/script/poem/essay as proof of when I created it, without
going to the bother and expense of copyrighting it?
Sure you can, but in the United States
this will not prove anything at all in a court of law. No US court at
any level has recognized this so-called Poor Man's Copyright. The
website of the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress even says
so, yet people who should know better still pass this information
around as if it has value.
The moment you save your writing to any
fixed medium--your computer's hard drive, a CD or flash drive, a
print-out, handwritten sheet of paper, a cocktail napkin--in the US,
it is copyrighted. Registration of that copyright offers further
protection and is not free, but it is not required for your work to
be copyrighted.
For whatever it may be worth,
violations of copyright for monetary gain are fairly rare.
What's increasingly common is the theft of writing posted online for
reposting elsewhere, without permission or acknowledgment. That's a
pretty compelling argument against posting in an open public forum, whether you're in the US and that work is automatically copyrighted or not.
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