In discussions regarding copyright and intellectual property, you may have heard of the so-called Poor Man's Copyright.
The method known as the poor man's copyright is not actually recommended by either the US or UK courts, and there is no published mention of it on the books in the US courts. However, it can be effective.
The way it works is that you simply mail yourself a copy of your work, be it a blueprint, a manuscript, etcetera, and leave the work in a sealed envelope until a time comes when you need to establish copyright.
This is seen as something of a makeshift copyright method, and might not always hold up in court, but can be helpful in some instances.
By sending yourself your work through registered mail, a date is established on the postmark. Say you mail yourself a manuscript in June, and then mail it to a publisher in July. The publisher decides to swipe your book and publish it without paying you, registering their own copyright on it a month after you've received your own poor man's copyright in the mail. What you have now is proof that you had something to do with the book a month before a copyright was ever registered.
Again, this isn't a fool-proof method, however, it can be helpful when you need to copyright in large volume, or right away, and do not have time or money to apply for an official copyright. For example, many musicians may create hundreds of new songs a year, and then send those songs out to various record labels and other musicians and so on. If the musician wants to protect himself, he can either register each song as they are created, probably spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars a year, or he can by some stamps and envelopes and send himself CDs or sheet music.
The main weak spot with the poor man's copyright is that the property has not actually been officially approved for a copyright. An official copyright application requires a work that to be not completely derivative, or that any similarities with another work are purely coincidental, and so on. Each country has different tests to put the work through before granting a copyright, and the by-mail method bypasses these tests, meaning that the copyright is a little weaker in a court of law.
A few things to remember if you are considering Poor Man's Copyrighting:
Do Not Open
When you receive your package back through the mail, do not open it. It's the postmark on the envelope or box that proves that you were the owner of a given work long before another part put out their own version of it, and if you unseal the envelope, you compromise the court's ability to prove that this was your intellectual property. An open envelope, you can literally stuff just about anything into it. You could take an envelope from fifty years ago, put a Garfield comic strip in it, and say you invented Garfield. So no, unsealed envelopes do not hold up in court.
It's Sort of a Temporary Fix
Again, because of the application process and so on, the poor man's copyright doesn't always hold up, and the UK courts actually recommend against it. When you don't have a lot of options, it is better than nothing, but it's a little like fixing a leak in your gas tank with a piece of bubble gum. It's better than ignoring it, but it's not as good as protecting yourself properly.
It Won't Hold Up Against a Previously Registered Copyright
Say you write a novel, and a friend of yours reads it, then swipes a manuscript and sells it to a book publisher. Unfortunately, either your (former) friend or the publisher owns the copyright now. You can't even go out and register the copyright in your name anymore, and it will probably require a lot of legal research and action before you can even think about getting your intellectual property back.
Protect Yourself, Now
Either with poor man's copyright, or going through the proper channels, protect your intellectual property right now. If you're writing a screenplay for example, copyright it as soon as you have a draft that you are willing to let other people read. You just never really know who might take an idea and pass it off as their own, and more often than not, once some intellectual property has been wrongly appropriated, it's hard or even impossible to get it back into the hands where it belongs.
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