This is GREAT! Okay if I steal it and use it on my website? (JK)

"Registration systems (including the government ones) are simply a verifiable date-stamp, nothing more." That is ludicrously wrong. Allow me to procrastinate: Without officially registering a work you cannot recover legal fees or receive statutory damages. In the case of a screenplay, the most you could recover is actual damages (meaning roughly the fair market purchase price for your script, and chances are you would be awarded WGA minimum) or profits (good luck proving they made profits). You also would be responsible for your own legal fees, which would run into the tens of thousands at minimum. There is no recourse to recover these fees if you haven't registered your work, so unless you can afford the fees out of your own pocket you will never find an attorney to represent you. The threat of statutory damages and recovery of legal fees is about the only thing that could possibly compel a deep-pocketed defendant to settle with some puny screenwriter. For the record, I think the danger of theft in the screenwriting world is so miniscule that it's really not worth worrying about -- you are VASTLY more likely to die in a car accident in the next year than you are to have your precious script stolen, and you don't lie awake at night worrying about that (I hope). But the idea that registering a copyright provides no more protection than a timestamp is just stupifyingly off-base.

Write it! So true. Anything else is a waste of time. Assume your idea is already out there, and it probably is, so just do a better job executing it. Try and sell it. Keep writing.

[...] Willis Road – An unknown suspect demanded property from two females who were sitting in a vehicle at the Ramada Inn – South in the 2100 block at 10:25 p.m. on Oct. 8. The driver put the vehicle in reverse, and the suspect walked away. Thieves steal pricey copper for profitable resale Copper continues to be a precious commodity for t...ttp://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.chesterfieldobserver.com%2Fnews%2F2011-10-19%2FCrime_Watch%2FThieves_steal_pricey_copper_for_profitable_resale.htmllinkname=Thieves%20steal%20pricey%20copper%20for%20profitable%20resale" id="da2a_1"> Thieves steal pricey copper for profitable resale [...]