I found that there's a writer's guild registration system, but it made me wonder what allows you to prevent people from reading work submitted to the writer's guild association and plagiarize it? Is there any mechanism that protects you even further or you must do due diligence and do the work yourself?
6
-
Why do you want to register your work with the writer's guild? Take a photograph of a friend and yourself holding the first page of your text and the cover of today's newpaper to be able to prove that you have written it before that date and that you have a witness for it.– user51172Commented Jun 17, 2021 at 13:18
-
2@fluctuatingpsychosis That's bad legal advice (a US court would not allow a lawsuit unless the work was registered) and also just bad advice. (Would you believe that I wrote this response before your comment? I'll send you the picture of this comment next to last week's newspaper, all with my friend's help...)– Laurel ♦Commented Jun 17, 2021 at 15:37
-
I'm not sure if they allow it, but is it possible to encrypt the work and only submit the encrypted version to the WGA? The author would be the only person with the key and can therefore prove beyond doubt to be the person who has submitted the work, while nobody else can read it until its decryption. On their website they say they accept "other digital content", so at first glance this could be possible.– MattCommented Jun 17, 2021 at 17:40
-
1@user51172 Laurel didn't say anything about photoshopping. All you have to do is get hold of a past issue of a newspaper and take the photo. Not exactly difficult to do. It only shows that the photo is taken earliest at that date, but could also be taken any day after until end of time. I can pose with a genuine Babylonian cuneiform tablet in my hand, does that prove that I lived around 3000 BCE?– tylisirnCommented Jun 19, 2021 at 19:52
-
2Coming at this from another angle, the WGA's members are all professional writers, editors and publishers--that is, people who care deeply about the issue of plagiarism. It is highly unlikely that anyone within that organization would plagiarize your work. They are too busy writing their own stuff. Anyway, the organization would not last long if they allowed their members to steal one another's work.– RobJarvisCommented Jun 22, 2021 at 20:13
|
Show 1 more comment
1 Answer
The very fact that work was publicly registered as of a certain date makes it less likely that a sensible person would plagiarize it, and somewhat easier to demonstrate the plagiarism if it did occur.
I rather doubt that this sort of intentional plagiarism is as large a problem as inexperienced writes often seem to fear that it is. Most copyright disputes that get to court are over other sorts of issues: what a license permits, what is or is not fair use, what is or is not a derivative work, etc. Not over a claim of direct plagiarism where the defendant claims to have been the true author.
The best protection is official copyright registration. This has direct legal effect, and in the US conveys a right to sue as well. But it does require payment of a fee.
The "photo with a newspaper" method does not really prove anything, as comments have shown. Sending a copy to oneself or a trusted friend by email gives a copy a timestamp in the records of the email provider, which would be much harder to fake, and would probably have some value as evidence, without paying the registration fee, or putting the text on public display.
-
Or use a solution like Dropbox with Scrivener (and two-minute autosave). When I write, it creates about 100 versions of the script per day (and with eternal versions, they aren't removed after a year). They are all date stamped and if I got really obsessive, it could be used to create a movie of how I wrote the script. As long as you trust the timestamps there is little question the script wasn't created by a human being...– ErkCommented Jun 24, 2021 at 23:20