I'm interested in getting involved here but based on some uncool experiences in the music biz as a kid, am VERY leery about realeasing stuff publicly before official US Gov copyright?

How can I protect my ideas? Remember not only other writers may be looking at this board! Need I mention Art Buchwald and the guy who really wrote Monster's Inc?

One reason is, as Phanto said, that most ideas really are not unique. Recognizing a piece of your idea in someone else's story does not necessarily mean they stole it from you. Even if someone does borrow something from your story, it will be fit into the new author's story in a different way, with a different angle, and with a totally different writing style. It will no longer really be yours anyway.

The other reason I'm not worried is that I don't just send off my ideas to one person, I send them off to a group. If someone from that group actually steals an idea then I have people to back me up.

Oh, by the way, as soon as you write something it is copywrited. Publication is not required for a copywrite.

Its like this...

1. Let say you wrote a story about a cute alien and some kids, and it was alot ALOT like E.T. ... BUT you never ever sent that story to anyone connected to Spielberg, or his agents, and basically it would have been near impossible for him to see your story.

Of course Speilbergs in the clear and it was just a creative coincedence, no prob.

BUT have any of you read that Monsters Inc synopsis that was actually SUBMITTED to the creative team at pixar LONG before inc was made!

HOLY CRAP! Its the same freakin' movie, Monstertown was Monsterville, Plot was near dead nuts same thing, Character names were like one or two letters off!

Monster's Inc. made HUGE NASTY PIMP MONEY AT BOX OFFICE!

Art Buckwald actually won at least a million after HARD LONG PAINFUL LAWSUIT for "Coming to America" the film with Eddie and Arsenio, he wrote and submitted the story to the same studio that ended up doing this flick. Of course title was different, but again main theme was dead on the same with again the just enough to legally steal "facelift", a few different character names, etc.

FOR INSTANCE, I wrote a detailed synopsis for a movie in which a caucasian guy ends up joining an old Kurosawa style band of Samurai's, VERY COOL story, VERY SIMILAR to Last Samarai now out in theatre's BUT I know Cruise and co, did not steal it because I never did ANYTHING with the concept other than shelve it.

However, when I was a kid, I worked on this guys song once, and we made a lo-fi 4-track cassette version of our work and we lost contact,

He already had a record deal and holy smokes, about 6 mo's later he releases a song that had literally 90% of the track we worked on, some easy lyric changes, a few flip flops of notes and because he had the connections, he basically yanked the whole productions style and just had it redone in a big multi million dollar studio.

Ouch did that hurt, legally he made JUST enough changes to keep him out of liability but man, it was the same thing with a minor facelift. It was not a billion dollar #1 but he did make some money, and I made none!

So my point is with the internet, I mean some rich studio ownin' chump could make a fake ID, lets pretend its, "WriterBoy9000"

He joins this group or one of the yahoo groups, sees some kick butt synopsis or story, cut and pastes it to his word processor, prints it, then hands it to a staff writer slave, and says,

"See what you can do with this, its a rough idea, but I think you can flesh it out."

3 months later, your little story has been given a facelift but is still the same guy. They get paid, you don't?

If we knew of a web site that was going to be live eternally guaranteed it might be okay because we could find post dates, and such etc.

?

Most companies that produce movies are willing to pay for the stories they use. There are a few companies that are a bit shady, and they get sued. If all of the people here never trusted anyone else they would end up doing it all by themselves. That would make this site, and any others like it pointless.