Film Intellectual Property Rights

vladwolodarsky

vladwolodarsky

Active member
Hey Guys-

I just completed a short film and I am about to launch a website based around the film and the characters. I checked with the U.S. copyright and trademark office and there is usually a ten month turnaround before your work is trademarked or copyrighted. Do you know of any other ways to protect the intellectual property rights of your film? Thank you for your time and any thoughts will be appreciated.

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Do the paperwork and get the copyright. Yes, it takes some time but the date of the copyright is the date they receive the paperwork.

According to copyright law, you are covered by the copyright when you create your work BUT for the ability to really enforce it, you need to jump through the hoops. Don't hesitate, get it going right now.
 
Thanks for your response Blaine. I didn't know that your copyright is effective the day it is submitted. That's huge! My business partner and I are going to be generating income through advertisements. So we decided to create an LLC. Do you think we should register the trademark under the company or our personal names? I asked an intellectual property attorney this question and he told me he wouldn't respond unless we put down a $3000 retainer!
 
I guess the safer bet is to put in our personal names. I am also planning on registering the script with the WGA . As far as I know the WGA keeps a record of the script on their server or at their office. They also send you a receipt acknowledging that they received your script. If it ever comes up the WGA will say that you're script existed on this date. Does anybody know of a similar service for video?
 
I think it's much more important to copyright a script, personally. I can see how that'd be extremely valuable and I think it just makes good sense to have that taken care of for peace of mind.

But for a short film? No way. What are you worried about happening? I think this is more uncertainty about the actual law, because I did this research back when I was writing my first book 8 years ago. ANY WORK is copyrighted when it is "fixed in a tangible medium of expression." You don't have to SUBMIT anything for it to be copyrighted. If I write an essay and it sits on my computer, it's already copyrighted. It's fixed in a tangible medium of expression. Now of course if someone else copies my essay and I can't prove that my document existed before theirs, I'm in trouble, but that's why I say it's more important for writing. I've published two books, neither of them are technically copyrighted, they aren't registered with the copyright office, but they are printed and published on a certain date. That is fixed in a tangible medium of expression, and in such a way that their dates can be defended. If someone copied my work now, and published it in another source, my books have publication dates and ISBN numbers with certain registration dates, so it's pretty obvious when they were copyrighted without needing to pay some organization for that.

With a film, I'd say the same thing -- if it was submitted to festivals of any sort, there are going to be rejection or acceptance dates, times where it played, a cast and crew who knows when it was finished, etc. It's all very transparent and defensible. There's no need to register a copyright for that type of work because the worst that could happen is someone copies your idea for a commercially viable project, they make money off it, now you have to sue them. Well, copyright or not, it won't matter. You still will have to prove that they didn't come up with that idea first, that they maliciously took your material (you have to prove they knew about it) and used it for their own purposes, etc. Those cases are very very hard to win. Most likely if the studio thought there were enough similarities to be worried about, they'd just offer you a settlement, and most likely it would be big enough that you'd be very happy and you'd move on.
 
JonathanLB said:
... ANY WORK is copyrighted when it is "fixed in a tangible medium of expression." You don't have to SUBMIT anything for it to be copyrighted. ....
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Exactly! The copyright is not something granted by the Copyright Office after processing your application. The actual copyright automatically exists from the moment the work is fixed in tangible form and it exists whether or not it is subsequently registered. What the copyright process does is REGISTER your copyright, recording as a matter of public record the fact that as of a certain date your copyright exists, establishing a 'paper-trail' of your ownership of the work.
 
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