Need help Copyrighting Your Film Script? One of the biggest fears for any scriptwriter is their work falling into the wrong hands and being horribly plagiarised. However, if you copyright your script then this need not be a worry.

There are certain things that you cannot copyright: ideas, titles, plots, phrases and basically anything that isn’t written down. You can though copyright your original spec script.

As current copyright law currently stands, as soon as you write your script you already own the copyright to it. The problem with this though is that you have no proof of copyright date. To rectify this problem you will need to register your script with the U.S Copyright Office which is in Washington, DC. They have a website which can be found at http://www.copyright.gov/. The process is straightforward and inexpensive.

When you have gone through the procedure of copyrighting your film script you will need to put notice of this somewhere on your script, preferably the cover page. It should look like this:

Copyright 2021 Joe King
Or
© 2021 Joe King.

To make sure your copyright is respected worldwide you want to add the phrase “All Rights Reserved” when registering with the U.S Copyright Office.

Despite this all being very simple most scriptwriters do not copyright their film script. This is mainly because once the script has been sold the production company will own the copyright to the script anyway. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t copyright your script though. Copyrighting your script gives you the best protection possible and also provides you with the peace of mind to begin circulating your script.

Other Ways to Protect Your Script

There are a few other ways to protect yourself other than copyrighting your movie script. If you give copies to people you trust and get them to read it then they can testify that you have written the script and when they read it.

One method that it already quite well known is “Poor Man’s Copyright”. This entails posting your script to yourself via registered mail and keeping it somewhere safe, without opening it. Because the date should be stamped on the envelope this proves when you wrote the script. However there is no guarantee that this method would hold up in a court of law.

The final thing to consider is actually one of the few advantages to being a first time scriptwriter. If you manage to successfully sell your script it will be a lot cheaper for the producer to just pay you $100,000 rather than steal your script and pay a recognised writer $300,000 to develop your script.

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