Timeline for Is there a format I can save my poems in that will make the publisher unable to copy and paste?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
8 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jun 19, 2015 at 23:07 | comment | added | rlb.usa | For perspective: Pretty sure a certain popular book company unbinds some textbooks, runs the pages through an OCR machine, and throws up the mostly-unformatted digital text as an e-book. Margins, foot-notes, pages, captions, etc are lost. Against this type of thing, none of us stand any chance - there is no control or protection. | |
| Jun 17, 2015 at 6:07 | comment | added | Jay | You have LEGAL protection. Anything you write is automatically protected by copyright, and if someone steals your work you can sue them. | |
| Mar 6, 2015 at 0:19 | comment | added | SF. | @PaulA.Clayton: True for a novel or the likes, but unless you write Epic Poetry like Illiad, most poems are maybe 1-2 pages long, so copying them is really easy. | |
| Mar 6, 2015 at 0:17 | comment | added | SF. | @PraveshParekh: There are smartphone apps that OCR photos directly from the phone camera. Besides, there are PDF reader applications that allow to simply ignore the 'protection' mark and copy the text away. | |
| May 8, 2014 at 16:02 | comment | added | user5232 | While I agree (especially point d for poetry), OCR is not in the same category of ease as copy and paste (and humans are still better at CAPTCHAs than computers). Making the publisher's job more difficult or implying the publisher is untrustworthy is unlikely to encourage reading much less accepting a submission. "Slush piles" are generally deep enough that publishers do not have to bother with submissions that violate their guidelines. | |
| May 8, 2014 at 7:58 | comment | added | Pravesh Parekh | Just to add to the answer, you can protect copying from pdf format and put a password so that OCR tools will ask for the password. However, it is not a fail proof method and I am sure there would be tools to get around this. Long story short, as James mentioned, you cannot absolutely guarantee that your work is secure. | |
| May 8, 2014 at 3:02 | review | First posts | |||
| May 8, 2014 at 3:11 | |||||
| May 8, 2014 at 2:45 | history | answered | jdevlin | CC BY-SA 3.0 |