Writing.Com General Discussion

I don’t really have any personal experience with copyright, and I’m not a lawyer, so take this advice with a grain of salt.

From what I can see in various forums and from talking with other authors, the general consensus seemed to be that you didn’t need to register copyright (in the US), that you just needed to be able to prove that you are the original author of a piece of work.
This also worked when it came to getting illegal copies of your work taken down.

However, in the various recent settlements made between publishers and AI companies, only authors/publishers who had registered copyright for the stolen work (and AI companies very much steal books and copy them word for word) got compensated. So… yeah.

The WdC copyright notice is not the same as registering copyright, but having your story on the site could help if you needed to provide evidence that it is actually your work.

Also, it’s worth noting that if you trad publish, it should be in the contract who needs to register copyright for the novel. Usually, this will be the publisher, but with recent AI lawsuits in mind, it’s worth making sure they actually do it (because many of them hadn’t).

If you selfpublish, well, yeah, that’s a lot of money to put out, but maybe it’s worth it.