Quote
Originally posted by jdh545:
Astually, idea theft is a common problem, and id dangerous as there is alomost no protection againtst it. You can copyright another's work, and there is little legal recourse. For this reason, authors are very protective of their unfinished books. To fight against it you have to prove that you were the origional author of these new ideas; something that is very hard to do. Without a formal copyright, your abilities to protect your work are severly limited.
Copyright registration with a government body is a means of protecting your copyright, not what creates the copyright. As for "idea theft", copyright protects what you've created, not the ideas behind it. So, if someone steals just the idea, but not the actual text of your book - or, to keep this EV-related, your plug-in - you can't really do anything about it, whether your book/plug-in was released or not at the time. That does not, however, mean that they can then take any action against you either.
It helps in all such cases if you can prove that you created the content in question first. The release of your plug-in with your name on it constitutes pretty good proof that you created it, but another good way to protect copyright is to send yourself a copy of your work by registered mail and not open it.
You also keep using the word "copyright" as a verb, which is not accurate; copyright is not something you do, but a property that is inherent in everything you create, unless you willingly and specifically waive it, which can be done (for example) by a declaration that your work is in the "public domain".
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David Arthur
(url="http://"http://davidarthur.evula.net/")davidarthur.evula.net(/url): MissionComputer and the Talon plug-in
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