How to protect an idea…

[Bruce Bennett]

Hi Sam,

“How do I protect my idea?” was one of the questions that I asked veteran documentary filmmaker David Hoffman for my 90-min. CreativeInspiration.com documentary on him. David has won Emmys, Cannes, most major film fests, aired on History Channel, Discovery, HBO, TBS, PBS, etc. His bottom line answer… Sign the people that you want in your documentary first/before approaching others for funding and development.

Best of Luck!
Bruce

Bruce Bennett
Bennett Marketing & Media Production, LLC
Creative InspirationDocumentaries for those who love to create … and to be inspired.

[Mark Suszko]

This is kind of a peripheral thing, but, if the program has a script, you can have it registered with the WGA for something like ten bucks for ten years. That would be one solid way to prove “prior art” for your version in a way that would stand up in court. You don’t have to be a Guild member to do this AFAIK.

https://www.wgawregistry.org/webrss/

Library of Congress also has a registration service, last I heard. Don’t know anything much about it.

Bruce gave you a pretty good answer. You can’t own the idea, but you can commandeer the people a rival would need in order to steal and use your idea. This is related to the idea of “optioning” a story from a book author or any person’s life story; you pay them a fee an in exchange they don’t work with anybody but you on the movie version, for a set time. After that set period, if nothing has happened, the option reverts to the person and someone else can make that deal. It’s more complicated than what I’ve laid out, of course, but this is the general idea. Buy the option on those people’s story and lock them into a commitment long enough that a rival can’t make use of it in time; then they have to come to you, if they want to do the project.

This is the supposed reason there was never a sequel to “Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension”: the guy who owned the options on the characters and etc. refused to allow it.

[Jonathan Ziegler]

This is pretty close:

If you are a WGA member, it’s $10 to register a script; $20 for non-members.

Library of Congress does not have a registration service. If you click the link, it takes you to the US Copyright Office which is $35 to register a work for a US copyright.

For a script, you can have both WGA protection and US Copyright protection. There are pluses and minuses for both methods and having both is not a bad thing. Also, US Copyright protection is much longer (many decades after your death versus 5 years total with WGA).

There is no such thing as a poor man’s copyright (sending it to yourself in mail). If you are going to go through that trouble, spend the $35 with the copyright office or $20 with WGA to register the work.

If it’s worth money at any point down the road, it’s worth registering. Protecting intellectual property is getting to be some pretty serious business moving into the future and will continue to be serious business as the Internet makes more and more challenges to much older intellectual property laws and precedents. I shoulda been a lawyer… 😉

Jonathan Ziegler
https://www.electrictiger.com/
520-360-8293

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Bruce and Mark is right, if you’ve got the sole access to the contributors/sources then the idea is yours to exploit. One way of doing it is to get the contributor to sign a release form.

Certain broadcasters won’t accept the programme as a documentary if the subject has been paid for it, so be very careful about offering money. Expert opinions is a different matter.

All the Best
Mads
London, UK

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[Grinner Hester]

You can’t protect an idea because everyone has them. That’s the easiest part in the industry, afterall. Without taking the initiative to create something you can protect, you are just giving folks with initiative good ideas. They really will take them without even saying thank you.