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I have had quite a few people ask how they can stop their scripts, or part of their scripts, being stolen.

There’s quite a few sides to this issue - not all of them are obvious.

A. Until you get an agent I don’t think you can practically do much more to protect yourself than by registering the work with one of the big guilds like the Writer’s Guilds of America or Canada.

B. Personally I never worry about people stealing my ideas. There’s two main reasons for that. Firstly I have an agent, who will obviously do what she could do if it ever came to it.

But secondly, as far as I’ve ever seen it, the industry just doesn’t work like that.

• Good ideas are relatively common - it’s the good EXECUTION of those ideas that is rare, the working out of a few ideas jotted down in a notebook to a full length screenplay.This works in your favour. Good scripts are very rare, and most production companies are desperate to find them. So if a great script comes into view I can’t conceive of a situation where they would not want to meet the writer, the person who actually did the work. To just take the script and run would be absolutely crazy.

  That’s because a script will never come in cold, and be shot as is - there will always be a lengthy period of rewriting, and everyone knows that, at least for the first draft of that, the only real choice for that is the original writer.

  (Now, if you send a script to a director, hmm.  In my experience some directors fancy themselves as writers when actually they don’t have the ability to come up with a full length script of their own. The worst type of director does indeed love to take over scripts and cut out the original writer. I’m afraid I can see an independent director wanting to fiddle with your script, saying, “hmmm, good starting point here, but if I cut that and boosted that and tweaked that - say - I could have something here…”

  Then there could be a tendency to pass that off as them “saving” the script - or even “all my own work, guvnor”.

  Moral, I guess if you are really paranoid submit to legitimate production companies only.

• Actually, just sending your script out cold in this way is a bad way to procede anyway. Read this blog entry for why:

  http://www.screenwritinggoldmine.com/blog/index.php/2007/06/13/opening-the-doors

• The final thing to say is in the very worst case scenario that all the copyright registration in the world won’t really help you if someone with a big legal budget, like, say, any major movie company, decides to steal your ideas.What, realistically, are you going to do? Are you really going to mortgage the house to take this company on? Seriously?

  I know I wouldn’t. I’d just go home, sit down, and write another idea. I’ve got loads of them, and life’s too precious to pour all my money and all my emotional energy into a legal war.

  I had this situation last year - I wrote an ep of a big show here in the UK, and for a week or so it seemed (rather unbelievably) as though the lead writer of the show was going to take my writing credit. Obviously I had a good contract, but it seemed as though it was just going to get steam rollered. My agent and I schemed and plotted, and fumed, and then realised we didn’t have the hundreds of thousands of pounds necessary to prove it, and certainly didn’t have the desire for a lengthy court case - and trying to prove ownership of something so nebulous as a set of ideas would be a nightmare.

  In the end we fought smart, and made a moral appeal to other people in the company, who put insider pressure on the Writer in question. The whole problem just melted away.

  Moral - fight clever, because odds are you don’t have the artillery to fight face to face.

So my conclusion to the whole issue is: Don’t Waste Your Time Worrying About Idea Theft.

1. You have to get your work out there, so you have to take the (in my opinion very) small chance you will be ripped off.
2. You’re protected as far as you can be without having an agent.
3. It’s very unlikely to happen so long as you submit it to production companies rather than rogue and immoral individuals (!).
4. You should be working on building relationships that pay off rather than expecting to be picked from obscurity by your script alone.
5. If it were to happen, odds are there’s very little you can do about it anyway.

FINAL CAVEAT: These are all my personal opinions, and I’m a writer, not a lawyer. Please ask a lawyer for a professional answer if you are actually going to worry.