How do you insure that your pitches are as unique as possible while not being too specific to insure maximum protection?

Question

Judges ruling in intellectual property infringement cases have confirmed "stock ideas alone" have no protection. Examples; "It's a show about race car drivers", or "The show follows a worldwide scavenger hunt", or "The contestants are all blindfolded" are all ideas, but those basic ideas alone are just stock ideas. Protection of an intellectual property lives in the specific and unique expression that is created beyond a stock idea, and a buyer's solicitation and exposure to that project prior to their own development of the same. Your task as a writer/creator is to develop your "idea" into a detailed and unique expression in a fixed format (written or filmed) that proposes or proves how the idea is expressed in end result.

https://www.tvwritersvault.com/creating/how-to-protect-movie-tv-show-ideas-scripts.asp

I was reading this and while I understand the need to have an unique expression, I am not sure if being too unique is a good thing or too specific since if your idea is too specific than someone can steal your idea by making the idea more general. Am I wrong to think this and also does that mean there are specific things I should focus on my pitches such as worldbuilding instead of story? Since the story can be easily changed while the worldbuilding can be hardly changed unless we're going for something different.

Answer 1

I am not sure if being too unique is a good thing or too specific since if your idea is too specific than someone can steal your idea by making the idea more general.

The whole point of needing a specific story/idea in order to gain protection is because once you take something to a "general idea" level it's not the same story and hence is no longer "stealing". This why no-one at Disney got sued over Armageddon despite it sharing the same general idea as Deep Impact and despite the film purportedly originating from a conversation between a Disney exec and Deep Impact's writer.

The phenomenon of two (or more) films getting produced at similar times with the same general plot is so extensive there's even a list at Wikipedia, this is just one of the many reasons why it's always a pretty safe bet to assume that your general story idea is far from unique, so yes someone could absolutely take your specific and detailed pitch and use the same general idea to create their own, but there's no point worrying about that because if that's what happens all it means is they didn't like your specific expression of that idea (which is all that was ever really yours anyway) - so it's functionally the same as a plain old "no thanks" in almost all respects.

If protection is what you're concerned about then the more specific details you provide in your pitch the more points of comparison can be made in the future. This means if any recipient of your pitch wants to implement their own version of your idea (as in the Deep Impact vs Armageddon scenario) it's going to have to be sufficiently different in terms of the details if they want to avoid getting sued (see Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe for an example where they didn't!). Copyright isn't a patent - it doesn't prevent someone coming up with the same idea independently so generally speaking even if the ideas and the details are sufficiently similar you need to be able to show that they could reasonably been aware of yours before they did their own, so withholding detail does nothing to protect you, if anything it makes it worse.

The same is to all intents and purposes true of worldbuilding as well as story elements - general similarities aren't going to be a problem. You can't, for example, claim ownership on the idea of a magical boarding school where kids learn how to be witches and/or wizards, something for which I'm sure J K Rowling is eternally grateful.