New version of the "mail it to yourself" copyright myth?

[Lysmata Debelius]

I've seen the claim that you can prove ownership of intellectual property by emailing a file to yourself. They claim that the datestamp on the server can't be tampered with. Would this work in a court of law?

[Tom Wood]

IANAL, but in the US that simply won't work. The law is very specific about what you must do to claim copyright benefits in a court of law. The main benefit is the ability to claim statutory damages, which gives an attorney who is working on contingency some expectation that money will change hands. The competency and motivations of the person who is making the assertion regarding email-copyright should be viewed with skepticism

[Post-Crisis D]

I am also not a lawyer, so take all this with that in mind.

As far as copyright goes, I guess it would be the equivalent of the "poor man's copyright" which is to say it would be equally ineffective.  Copyright is secured upon creation of a work and, in the U.S., registration is required for full benefits of copyright protection.  So, eMailing a copy to yourself isn't going to really assist in that.

Insofar as establishing that you wrote it and when you wrote it, well, maybe it might be useful.  That is, if you can show you wrote it before someone else wrote it, you might be able to help establish that they copied you rather than the other way around.*  Whether the datestamp on the eMail would be considered credible in a court of law, I don't know.  Additionally, you would have to take eMail retention policies into consideration.  The datestamp is only useful insofar as the eMail provider has a record of that eMail.  If they've deleted the data from their servers and archives, there's no way to prove the datestamp you show on your copy of the eMail is correct because there would be no way to verify it against your eMail provider's records.

Laws regarding eMail retention vary.  The average is three to seven years depending on who and what and why the eMails might need to be retained.  So, let's say that they only retain records for seven years.  If you're involved in a copyright infringement lawsuit within those seven years, there's the possibility their records could be subpoenaed to verify your datestamps.  After that seven year period, you'd be out of luck.

Maybe one of the actual lawyers that linger around here can offer more accurate information.

*And note here that you have to prove that they copied from you, not just that you both had similar ideas and maybe you started on yours first.  Can you prove they had access to yours, for example?

So, I don't know.  It seems to be a lot of work to eMail copies of stuff to yourself all the time, and then maintain those eMails and datestamps and hope your eMail provider retains those records to be able to verify your datestamps if need be and hope if your work is infringed that it occurs before your provider has deleted their records and so on.  And, if that work isn't going to be useful or valid in a court of law, you've done a lot of busy work that accomplished nothing.

The likelihood of someone stealing your stuff prior to publication is pretty slim.  Sure, a hacker could get into your computer, but a hacker is probably more interested in your financial stuff than your writing.  If you're concerned, you could work on a computer completely disconnected from the Internet.

Otherwise, once you publish, then your work is out there.  That's when it's more likely to be copied.  And if you publish something on Amazon tomorrow and someone copies it and posts their version next week, well, you can show that you published first.  And if they copy word for word, well, you've got that too.  They could try to claim you copied them, but then they have to prove you had access to their work prior to publication.

So, when you take all that into consideration, I'm not sure how much, if any, benefit there would be to eMail copies to yourself.

[Tafkal]

Otherwise, once you publish, then your work is out there.  That's when it's more likely to be copied.  And if you publish something on Amazon tomorrow and someone copies it and posts their version next week, well, you can show that you published first.  And if they copy word for word, well, you've got that too.  They could try to claim you copied them, but then they have to prove you had access to their work prior to publication.

So, when you take all that into consideration, I'm not sure how much, if any, benefit there would be to eMail copies to yourself.

I email each day's work to myself rather than just the final file, on the grounds that if my work does get copied after publication, I have an email trail of the actual writing process from start to finish. I have no idea whether that has any legal validity, but I've always supposed it would add weight to my claims that the work is mine, at least.

[Al Stevens]

I can't speak for the law, but anything on a server can be tampered with if you know how. Everybody should know that by now, given the hacking that's been publicized over the past few years.

[Bill Hiatt]

Otherwise, once you publish, then your work is out there.  That's when it's more likely to be copied.  And if you publish something on Amazon tomorrow and someone copies it and posts their version next week, well, you can show that you published first.  And if they copy word for word, well, you've got that too.  They could try to claim you copied them, but then they have to prove you had access to their work prior to publication.

So, when you take all that into consideration, I'm not sure how much, if any, benefit there would be to eMail copies to yourself.

I email each day's work to myself rather than just the final file, on the grounds that if my work does get copied after publication, I have an email trail of the actual writing process from start to finish. I have no idea whether that has any legal validity, but I've always supposed it would add weight to my claims that the work is mine, at least.

That wouldn't be a substitute for copyright registration, but it sounds as if it would be good supporting evidence of your work process if you ever needed such a thing.

[PJ Post]

As for copyrights in general: a copyright provides protection for original works of authorship, and is automatically granted upon the IP being fixed in a tangible medium of expression, however, to bring suit in a court of law, in the US, you must first hold a valid (registered) copyright of the IP in question. Pretty sure that's a full stop right there.

[Bill Hiatt]

I'm not sure what emailing yourself a copy of your work would do that being able to show the publication date won't. Amazon and other distributors have records of when you first starting selling through them, after all.

I wish I'd been registering my work all along. I'm gradually catching up now. The only real hassle is waiting for the copyright office to process the application in each case--which can take a looong time. The fee isn't that exorbitant, and once you have it, you have many more legal options than you had without it. It's just worth it, and people should realize that, particularly if they treat writing as a business.

(And yes, as PJ Post correctly points out, you need to registered to bring suit for infringement. This particular point was recently clarified in a supreme court case which I think was mentioned in another thread. I suspect that's why the copyright office has a process that allows for expedited registration in the event that there's a legal issue--but there's a hefty extra fee for that. It's better to have registered the material in the first place.

[veinglory]

Email and file dates can be changed.  And as with the original version you could leave the stamp and change the content.  So, no.

[Lysmata Debelius]

 Thanks everyone. That's what I suspected.
Where I live you don't have to register copyright but even so this wouldn't even prove that you created something first.
Kind of annoying that a new copyright myth seems to be spreading.

[spin52]

Otherwise, once you publish, then your work is out there.  That's when it's more likely to be copied.  And if you publish something on Amazon tomorrow and someone copies it and posts their version next week, well, you can show that you published first.  And if they copy word for word, well, you've got that too.  They could try to claim you copied them, but then they have to prove you had access to their work prior to publication.

So, when you take all that into consideration, I'm not sure how much, if any, benefit there would be to eMail copies to yourself.

I email each day's work to myself rather than just the final file, on the grounds that if my work does get copied after publication, I have an email trail of the actual writing process from start to finish. I have no idea whether that has any legal validity, but I've always supposed it would add weight to my claims that the work is mine, at least.

I do that, too, but mostly because I'm paranoid that my ancient laptop will crash, taking my work with it. I never thought about it providing any kind of trail to prove authorship.

[bardsandsages]

I email each day's work to myself rather than just the final file, on the grounds that if my work does get copied after publication, I have an email trail of the actual writing process from start to finish. I have no idea whether that has any legal validity, but I've always supposed it would add weight to my claims that the work is mine, at least.

Much like the myth of mailing the story to yourself, all this proves is that you have a copy of the file. Particularly considering how easy it is to fake headers and such with email, unless people are bringing in forensic experts to examine your computer those emails mean nothing. Particularly if you are using, say, a free email service like gmail. That doesn't carry nearly any weight (unlike corporate emails which are generally stored on private servers owned by the company that have strong encryption).

In copyright cases, ownership of copyright is usually not the problem. Proving infringement is the problem. These are two different things. In most cases, the infringer rarely challenges the OWNERSHIP of the original work. There really aren't that many cases of someone copying a work verbatim and then trying to claim ownership of it after they were caught.

Rather, they will claim one of three things:

1. Claim ignorance. Particularly if they can blame a ghost writer. i.e. "I didn't know this person I hired to ghost write for me was plagiarising or infringing other other people's work."

2. Claim fair use. They will make some argument that it is "fair use" because the majority of people have no real clue what fair use actually means and they think "Well, I think it is fair so that is fair use."

3. The trickiest defense is the concept of multiple discovery/simultaneous invention. You think your plot was so original and unique and come across another work where it feels like someone copied your plot and characters and just changed around the names and locations, and the person will claim that maybe your idea wasn't so unique after all because they wrote this story themselves. This is often what happens in the movie industry when people claim their scripts were "ripped off" by someone else.

[Edward M. Grant]

Email and file dates can be changed.  And as with the original version you could leave the stamp and change the content.  So, no.

But it's hard to change the email if it's sitting on Google's gmail servers rather than on your PC. You'd need to hack into their servers and modify their copy of the email, which is hopefully not something easy to do.

Not that I'd consider it as an alternative to registration, but if I was called in as  a technical expert I'm sure I could make a good case that it would prove to a high degree of confidence that you had the file well before it was published.

I don't know whether they still exist, but there used to be document timestamping services which would sign a document to say they saw it at a certain time, and publish a list of document hashes so anyone could verify at a later date that the document was on that list. Again, not perfect proof, but something to add to the evidence that you were the originator of the document and not someone else.

[Tafkal]

I email each day's work to myself rather than just the final file, on the grounds that if my work does get copied after publication, I have an email trail of the actual writing process from start to finish. I have no idea whether that has any legal validity, but I've always supposed it would add weight to my claims that the work is mine, at least.

Much like the myth of mailing the story to yourself, all this proves is that you have a copy of the file. Particularly considering how easy it is to fake headers and such with email, unless people are bringing in forensic experts to examine your computer those emails mean nothing. Particularly if you are using, say, a free email service like gmail. That doesn't carry nearly any weight (unlike corporate emails which are generally stored on private servers owned by the company that have strong encryption).

Well, of course. :-) All I meant was that if somebody did decide to lift my book wholesale, they probably wouldn't go to the bother of creating 35 separate files of 2k, 4k, 6k words etc. to show the progress of the work. Plus, as somebody pointed out upthread, this method is also great for backup.