Copyright Laws and a Writer’s Rights

In Southern California, it seems almost everyone is an aspiring writer. Bartenders, accountants, bus drivers and lawyers pepper their cocktail-party chatter with references to a screenplay in progress, a film treatment under development or a novel about to be finished.

Even assuming all those people really are writers, and not pretenders, many probably can’t afford a lawyer to explain their legal rights as writers, and more important, to help them take the proper steps to protect those rights. Often interspersed in the literary chatter are all sorts of myths and misinformation about the law. So here’s a helpful primer we’ll call legal tips for writers.

Letters Protected

You don’t have to register your written work in order for it to be protected by copyright. Under U.S. copyright law, you own a copyright in your work the minute you finish writing it. So even a letter you write is protected by copyright. However, in order to let the world know that you consider the work copyrighted, and to get the most legal protection, you should place a copyright notice on every copy of the written work.

To indicate copyright ownership, you must place on your material a little copyright symbol, , a “c” inside a circle, the word copyright or the abbreviation copr. , followed by the year in which it was created and the name of the author or copyright owner. For example, a notice might read: Copyright 1989 by Jeffrey S. Klein. If I might distribute the work overseas, and wanted to have the benefit of certain international copyright treaties, I would add the words: “All Rights Reserved.”

It is also wise to register your work with the U.S. Copyright Office, because you obtain added rights in the event you have to sue someone for copyright infringement. You register by filling out a form and paying a fee of $10.

For further information about registering, write Information and Publications Section, LM-455, Copyright Office, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20559. Your employer is the copyright owner of your work if it is created as part of the course and scope of your regular employment.

If you are writing for motion pictures, television or radio, you can register your material with the Writers Guild of America. Call (213) 205-2500 for more information.

Ideas are not protected by copyright law. That may seem like a pretty simple statement, but it is widely misunderstood. Copyright law protects the expression of ideas, the words you select to communicate the ideas, not the ideas themselves. So if you only have an idea for a screenplay--a visitor from outer space befriends a young boy who helps him return home--and someone makes a movie or writes a book based on your idea, you can’t win a suit based only on copyright infringement.

Law of Contracts

The law of contracts may offer some limited legal protection for your ideas. If you pitched the idea to a producer at the Polo Lounge (or anywhere else, if you don’t breakfast there) and then the producer creates a television show based on your idea, you may win a lawsuit for breach of an implied contract, providing you can prove, among other things, that you told the producer your idea.

It is copyright infringement when you use someone else’s copyrighted words without their permission. There is a common misconception that you can borrow a certain number of words, some people say it’s 50, some say 250, and reprint them in your own work and it won’t be an infringement. That’s not true; there is no magic formula.

There is a legal doctrine called “fair use,” which allows a person to reprint another person’s words, but there is no established limit on how much can be taken. It all depends on the circumstances. Whether your use is for educational purposes, how much you borrow compared to the length of the work from which you’re borrowing, and perhaps most important, whether your use of the other person’s words will interfere with the marketability of the original work.

You can’t write anything you want to write about any living person. You can be sued for libel if what you write is not true and hurts the person’s reputation, although public officials and public figures face difficult constitutional barriers to winning a judgment. And even if everything you write is the absolute truth, you could lose an invasion-of-privacy suit, if you are revealing previously unknown, offensive private facts not of legitimate concern to the public, such as the details of a sex change operation.

If you have a co-author who works with you on your books or screenplays, be sure you have a written collaboration agreement that spells out in detail the nature of the partnership: how profits will be divided, how credit is to be accorded, how work is to be apportioned and anything else you can think of about your business relationship. Also, try to decide in advance what you’ll do if one of you wants to drop the project before it is completed.

Finally, get yourself a good agent (with a written agreement). And if you write a best seller, perhaps you’ll be able to afford a good lawyer. Good luck.