The Effectiveness of By-Mail Copyright
The traditional, and honestly, the most effective way to register a copyright and make sure that it actually holds up in a court of law, is to go through a notary public. The exact duties and abilities of a notary public may actually vary slightly from state to state, country to country, or jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but the general purpose of a notary public is to serve as a sort of official, legal witness to things like contract signings, wills, and, of course, copyrights.
Note that copyrights, patents, and trademarks are three different things. A trademark is made official the moment you start using it.
You don’t need to actually register a trademark for the trademark to be, legally, your trademark. A trademark can be a logo, a signature, or even a company name, and it is officially yours in any jurisdiction where you are using it (though others are free to use it wherever your trademark is not in use).
A patent must first be applied for through a patenting office. Patents pertain to inventions, but the term “invention” actually extends past what you might think of as an invention, ie. technological gadgets and so on. A patent could be something like the rules and control scheme for a video game, a formula for a perfume, or even an improvement on an existing, patented invention.
And copyrights, of course, pertain to intellectual property. Not so much like, say, blueprints and plans for actual, tangible inventions or anything complex like a video game engine, but anything abstract enough to not really fit into a blueprint. This can include fictional characters and settings, stories, music, and so on.
Copyrights are the only one of these three which can be protected by simply sending yourself a copy of the work you wish to copyright in the mail. Normally, a notary public would stamp a manuscript of your new novel, a sketch of your comic book characters, some sheet music, etcetera. When you can’t find a notary public, or you can’t afford the (admittedly modest) fees charged by notary publics, the by-mail copyright method is a quick, cheap, and easy way to protect yourself.
The way it works is that, when the envelope containing your work goes through the mail, it will be postmarked. Let’s say you send yourself a manuscript in 2007, and then, in 2008, you send that manuscript to a publisher. The publisher likes the book, but as it turns out, the publisher is also pretty unscrupulous. They hire a ghost writer to change character names around and change the title, while leaving everything else about the same. The publisher then registers a copyright for the book. Now, if you’ve left your manuscript in the envelope you sent it to yourself in, then you can take that into court, open it up, and prove that you actually wrote that book one year before the publisher registered his own copyright on the slightly modified version of the book.
How well does that really hold up, though?
To be honest, it’s kind of up to the judge’s discretion. There have been plenty of cases where the by-mail copyright has saved an author’s behind, but there have been just as many cases where the judge did not recognize it as a real copyright.
One worry might be that anyone who were so inclined could simply mail themselves an envelope. A year later they decide to file a crazy lawsuit against a book publisher just to make some quick cash, so they take a popular novel, rewrite it into a manuscript, print it out, and then open their year-old envelope, put the manuscript in, and re-seal it. It sounds crazy, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
A notary public’s stamp, on the other hand, is one hundred percent official, and the US court system is obligated to honor it.
As a temporary fix, the so called “poor man’s copyright” method is better than nothing. Likewise, if you can’t afford notary public fees (but come on, notary public fees aren’t really all that expensive, and if you have a friend who’s a notary public, he or she might do it for free), again, it’s better than nothing.
But it’s not as good as a real copyright.
