Aug 14 2010
What Authors Should Know About Copyright (and Defeating Plagiarists)
1. What do I need to do to copyright my work?
Nothing, if you’re an American, Australian, Brazilian, British, Canadian or Irish author. Your work is automatically protected by copyright as soon as you write it. You don’t need to register your work or do anything else to copyright it.
However, if you wish to sue somebody for copyright infringement, you’ll probably need to pay a small fee to register your copyright with your national copyright office first ($35 in the United States). I’d recommend leaving that to your publisher, because suing somebody is almost always impractical before you get published. There are more cost-effective ways of defending your work and/or dealing with plagiarism than spending thousands of dollars on a lawyer.
