Wendy Cope | The Law Of Copyright

Although I’ve been invisible for the past couple of weeks while I got the first draft of “The Odyssey” under wraps, I haven’t been ignoring anyone.

Someone recently asked me about the safety of posting my work online, even with obvious copyright and authorship marks on it. Their concern, as I understood it, was that I was opening up my work to be used/produced by anyone without my knowledge (which is bad enough) or even copy it to their website without permission (even worse) but that it was also possible for someone to appropriate my work as their own . . . and that I’d probably never find out about it.

The reality is that I have been giving my work out for over ten years. There are at least three hundred different scripts out there floating around (not three hundred plays, mind you, three hundred print-outs). I don’t know who has them. I don’t know where they are. Many of them are outdated, previous drafts ridden with bad dialogue and embarrasing typos — not too different from what’s been posted here, actually (but I digress…)

Although there is a possibility that this could lead to any number of the bad situations listed above, the more probable reality is that this opens up the opportunity for my work to be done.

And it isn’t that hard to find me, these days, if you’ve got a fleeting acquaintance with Google.

I don’t worry about it as much as I used to. Sure, I won’t post unfinished work and it’s rare when I ever talk about something in the works or (even worse) an idea I have for something. But I don’t lie awake at night wondering if someone out there is rehearsing “Idle Hands” without my knoweldge.

I’ll hear about it, sooner or later. It’s a pretty small world. People seem to know people. And although I’m somewhat removed from the mainstream (so far) I am connected to people who are active on both coasts, in professional and academic circles. Many of them know what I’m working on, what I’ve written in the past, and they’d almost certainly call to let me know if someone else had just won the Pullitzer prize for a play called “The Red Boy”.

Which is, of course, not to say that anyone is welcome to try. If you’re interested in the work, you know how to get ahold of me.