WORK:Story Writer's Guild by Jean Lorrah

Paul Mason inquired of us:

Is there a "story writer's guild" or equivalent, where story ideas are
registered to prevent them from being stolen?
Our Magnesium Web Site is: http://www.execpc.com/~magnesum

Paul Mason

Go to the Library of Congress Copyright Office website or send for their
publications and you will find that one of the things they stress over and
over (because they are asked it over and over) is that AN IDEA CANNOT BE
COPYRIGHTED.

You can only copyright a completed work: a poem, a song, a story, a
computer program, a quilt pattern, etc. The only way to prevent an idea
from being developed by someone else is not to tell anyone else about it
UNTIL you have turned it into a completed work. Then copyright that work
and you have established your right to that work--but not to the idea
behind it.

If ideas could be copyrighted, no one could create another story in which a
man and a woman fall in love, have their problems, but end up together at
the end, because that idea has already been taken. No one could create
another movie about a battalion of soldiers from diverse backgrounds who
all have to learn to respect each other and become a unit before the big
battle. You see?

So go ahead and write your story, copyright it (all you have to do is put
your notice on it under the new law--register it only after someone
purchases it for publication), and don't worry about anyone stealing your
ideas. After all, consciously or unconsciously you are using someone
else's ideas--a genuinely new story idea only comes along about once every
fifty years anyway. It's what you DO with that idea that can be copyrighted.

If you are an aspiring story writer, you may be interested in our
WorldCrafters Guild, http://www.simegen.com/school/schoolinfo.html .

Jean Lorrah