not much to worry about here. In english law you pretty much get copyright automatically. If you can prove you wrote something at a given time (easy in my case cos of the ebay stuff and the domain name registration) no-one can steal your stories. People don't often try.
the real issue is trademarking. They won't steal your story but they will print t-shirts of your character.
This is a massive issue for self publishers because trade marks are expensive and you have to register for loads of categories. I'm slightly lucky becuase all of my characters are essentially the same drawing in different colours - I can trademark a black and white outline of them (different colours are extra). Even so just to protect T-shirts and stationery (my guess for the two biggest money spinners) would be £250 for the UK alone! Being a realist, as a UK self publisher if you're worrying about the japanese merchanise market you're probably getting ahead of yoursel, but it's worth keeping an eye on things in case your stuff becomes popular quickly. Try to know about it.
see this link for details
http://www.ukpats.org.uk/applytm.pdf
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment