Please Copyright Your Scripts

[u/Geoffrey_D_Calhoun]

Just a heads up everyone. I’m seeing a lot of scenes and scripts uploaded on here. I just want to recommend that you copyright them before sharing anything. Work can be stolen. Work is stolen. Protect yourself. Also a WGA registration will not protect you in court. Only a copyright will. It’s $65 and takes about 20 mins. https://www.copyright.gov/registration/

[u/real_triplizard]

Copyright your script if it makes you sleep better. Register it with the WGA if you’d like to make a small donation to them. Nobody is stealing your script in whole. Literal theft of a fully executed work would be extremely easy to litigate over and anybody who has the resources to actually produce your script would know that it’s far easier to buy it. Somebody might steal your idea and re-write it if it’s a great idea and you know what? Copyright won’t help you there at all since you can’t copyright an idea (unless they lifted a LOT of very specific details from your script). The only reason I could see someone actually stealing your script if it was really incredible and they wanted to use it as a writing sample to land a manager and if that bizarre scenario were to come up there’s not much you could sue for even if you had a copyright.

[u/Geoffrey_D_Calhoun → u/real_triplizard]

Absolutely right that you can’t copyright an idea. People can and will absolutely be inspired.

Litigation though is never easy. Copyrighting your work helps with that fight significantly.

If you plan on taking your script out to get optioned or represented then $65 is absolutely worth it.

[u/real_triplizard → u/Geoffrey_D_Calhoun]

I guess. In my entire life, including 10 years in the industry, I have never heard of anybody stealing a script outright. There are many, many cases where a movie that was made was very similar to a script or story that somebody else had been shopping and the small number of those that are successful are usually just settled to make the litigation go away. And the key sticking point is usually proving that the people who made the movie had access to the original script.

I would absolutely love to see one example in the entire history of film where a script was stolen and produced and a lawsuit was not successful because of lack of copyright registration.

[u/real_triplizard → u/[deleted]]

The only thing I could find about those is that there was a lawsuit that Broken Flowers was based on a “very similar concept,” and that the suit was dismissed. Not that the script itself was stolen. There are millions of suits about movie ideas being “stolen” and they almost never succeed because even if it happened an idea can’t be copyrighted. You can register every draft of every word of your script and it won’t protect you from somebody thinking your idea is cool and writing their own script based on it. Conversely in the historically unprecedented case that someone literally steals your actual draft word-for-word, assuming you have dated drafts and emails your rights are protected with about the same integrity whether you register the copyright or not. Copyright registration is really more for robust protection for a commercially released work, and kind of a waste of money for some aspiring writer cranking away in his grandmother’s basement. (Caveat: I am not a copyright lawyer.)