Spot1990 said:
maninahat said:
Spot1990 said:
I'm a film student working on my own screenplay with a second planned. Not gonna lie, it'll be hard to get writers to post up their ideas for an unfinished work they have no proof of ownership for. I know I would never do it and I would not recommend it to anyone else.
Through my own writing groups, I encounter countless other writers who fret about plagiarism, as though some thief is going to go to the trouble of writing an entire book off of a damn log line they provided on a forum. Plagariasm shouldn't be that much work, and if I was going to steal a story, I'd at least steal one that was both finished and
publishable, let alone good.
Log line yeah but anything more is stupid. It also affects your chances of financial backing. For instance most magazines that publish short stories require that they've not been published elsewhere and that the magazine owns the copyright and sole publishing rights for a certain period. It's not about plagiarism it's about not shooting your own career in the foot. It's also why it's a bad idea to upload videos to sites like youtube if you plan on doing something with the video. A lot of short film contests won't accept admissions that have been released online. Plus there's the whole adage that you can't copyright an idea. Sure it's unlikely it'll get taken but that doesn't mean the chance is worth the risk. BTW, I'm a stand up comedian too, joke theft is a pretty common thing and I really hate it. So my views on plagiarism are based on an industry where plagiarism is rampant.
I'd say it's far easier to steal a joke than a book idea. With the former, all the work has already been done by someone, and it requires no effort to copy. The latter requires a lot of work to make an idea into an actual story. I wrote a story once about a man who becomes the father of an ornamental garden gnome. It's a weird idea that few would even want to make into a story, even if they were plagiarists. And even if they were to try and write a full story from, say, an exert I provided on the internet, it would come out very differently in the end. This would be less of an affront to me, because my final product will most likely be better than a derivative. Plus it would be no difficulty proving that my work was the original, being that I'd have all the original drafts, scraps and forum posts to provide an audit trail.
As to whether it is a good idea to publish entire stories online, you are right. If you want to make some money off of it, don't publish it. Then again, by publishing it online, you are making it harder for plagiarists to cash in on your work, seeing as how the publisher can easily discover a rip off with a google search.
