Hey folks,
I need some advice on how to go about copyrighting some characters, names, and stories that I'm putting together.  Although Canadian laws may differ from all yous in the States, any advice is welcome.

Thanks
Tort

I do know that in the US a creative work doesn't have to be specifically registered to be protected by Copyright law, but registration of copyright is the only way to guarantee that you can't get ripped off.  (Even then, I think the registration could be invalidated if a person were to prove that the work was itself an infringement, but that would involve messy legal action.)  Registering a copyright is expensive.  Not mortgage the house expensive but still costly enough to be non-trivial.  You wouldn't do it for anything but professional level work with inherent value.

I've never done it, but there's a 'poor-man's' copyright... where a writer or artist can mail themselves a copy of their work and never open the envelope.  The cancellation mark on the stamp acts as a kind of proof of date.  In the event that copyright infringement were to occur, I assume you'd take the envelope to a lawyer for advice on how to proceed.  How effective that might be, I couldn't say.

I've often thought about the potential for digital copyright that would work much the same way.  If you could store content digitally in such a way that you can prove when it was created and who stored it you'd have the basis of a claim.  So if, for example, someone created an infringing work in 2007 and I could show that I stored the original work digitally in 2006 I could reasonably demonstrate infringement.  The basic problem there is that digital works (including file dates and author) can often be altered by someone who knows what they're doing, so it isn't iron clad.

Not sure how this would actually... but this is funny considering an issue I've been having the last several years with a former writing friend.

Long story short, about 15 years ago a friend and I did some fun writing back and forth just for fun on a never ending story BBS subboard.  She later took it and applied to a webpage.  We kept writing for fun, but she kept getting more and more serious about our "deadlines" and then started putting up her name only as the copyright holder on the webpages.

Needless to say... I didn't take this well.

She then later proceeded to tell me she had intended to sell the story and that she has sole rights to it, since she edited it and that my part of the stories were crap.

Thats when I dropped the bomb on her.  In every other chapter I had wrote, I placed a secret phrase or series of sentences that were directly pulled from some other work of literature.  Call it strategic placement of plagarization if you will.  Stopped her cold from doing what she wanted since she had no IDEA what I put --- or where and still doesn't.  Heh.

End of story, my name is now up there too.  :P

"Poor Man's Copyright" no longer works from what I hear. So I wouldn't take the chance. Though if you put it on a webpage and the webpage is dated and what not, that counts.

Get your info straight from the source:

http://www.copyright.gov/

Quote from: Ajax on August 24, 2007, 10:00:19 PM
"Poor Man's Copyright" no longer works from what I hear. So I wouldn't take the chance. Though if you put it on a webpage and the webpage is dated and what not, that counts.

Okay... prove to me that the webpage and the date were not altered or tampered with.

From the person who took Copyright Law in law school....

There's no such thing as a "Poor Man's Copyright."  At least, not as far as getting any enforceable rights goes.  Yes, it can show that you came up with something first.  But it doesn't do jack squat against someone else proceeding with their allegedly "independently created" version.

If you want a copyright that is enforceable against others, you fill out the form and file with the Copyright Office.  It's $45 in the United States.  You can fill out the form yourself.  You don't even need a lawyer.

The website that JKCarrier pointed to really is the best source for US copyright-seekers.  I think you can download any forms that you want to fill out from there.

Follow the links, and you'll even find a helpful section that explains that cartoons and comic strips can be copyrighted.  A series of comic strips can be registered for copyright as a collection, as is mentioned at that particular link.  I believe this is meant to provide a recognition of the reality that ongoing series would start getting prohibitively expensive to copyright if each individual element had to be paid for separately.

But compared to the expense of filing for a patent or trademark.... getting a copyright is cheap.

http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/sc_mrksv/cipo/cp/cp_main-e.html

Here's the Canadian version, if you are lookin'.

Quote from: RTTingle on August 24, 2007, 09:41:58 PM
Thats when I dropped the bomb on her.  In every other chapter I had wrote, I placed a secret phrase or series of sentences that were directly pulled from some other work of literature.  Call it strategic placement of plagarization if you will.  Stopped her cold from doing what she wanted since she had no IDEA what I put --- or where and still doesn't.  Heh.

End of story, my name is now up there too.  :P

And the beauty of this is that it doesn't even have to be true as long you can convince her that it is!

Thanks for the Canuck link, Unko.

From what I can figure out, I can copyright the title of the work, but I didn't see anything specific about premise, characters, etc.  Anyone have insight on that in particular?

Um, that's not quite true, Tort.  Looking at this part of the Canadian copyright pages, which follows the same premise as American copyright law, reveals the following:

1) Titles and other short phrases are typically not copyrightable.  That's more of a matter of trademark protection, really.  The title is like a brand name, so to speak - it's how people identify the source of the material.

2) Ideas and concepts cannot be copyrighted.  I'm not quite certain how you're defining "premise," but you can't copyright the premise of a world where people randomly develop mutations that give them strange and incredible powers, for example.

Now, characters are another story.  Let's say that I created my own original first edition of a comic book, and filed it with the Copyright Office.  Everything that I put into that printed work is now copyrighted.  The dialogue, the specific look of the characters combined with the name, etc.

Of course, with any form of intellectual property, the exact boundaries of what can be protected are hard to define.  But let me illustrate with another example.

You can't just copyright the name, "Tortuga."  It's the name of an island in the Caribbean, and the name of a battleship, for starters.  If I wanted, I could create a pirate-themed character and call him Tortuga, and probably not run afoul of infringing a copyright that you might hold.

You could, however, write a story about the adventures of Tortuga - a man who became a bipedal turtle-man with phenomenal strength and resilience, and a wacky sense of humor, and copyright that.  And if I tried to write a story in which my pirate Tortuga was a turtle-man pirate... I'd be swimming in dangerous waters.

Enforcing a copyright, at the end of the day, comes down to somebody comparing the alleged original to the alleged ripoff, and deciding if he thinks the ripoff is derived from the original.

Ultimately, my words of wisdom on copyrighting stuff boils down to this:

Write your story and/or draw your art, and get that filed with the Copyright Office.  If someone else tries to make a work that "looks like" one or more of the characters in your own copyrighted work, you arguably have a cause of action against that person.