How To Protect Your IP Writing with Artifacts of Creation

Congratulations, you wrote a thing.

Whatever it is, soon, your mind will fall to protecting it — to making sure that someone can’t steal it, sell it without you, or claim it as their own. Because creating something powerful, poetic, or personal is every bit as hard as building a house, getting some intellectual property insurance (or at least assurance) is a very good idea.

This is especially true in our AI age, where you cannot be sure what can be protected, where your work may end up, or whether you may at some point be accused of using AI to create it — an outcome that may impact your actual legal protections.

But don’t let these realities cause you too much anxiety. There are a few relatively easy things you can do to protect your work or to get it in the best position to be protected, should the need arise.

To be clear, this is not legal advice. I am not even a lawyer. I don’t even play one on TV. But I am a writer and publisher. I’ve filed works with the US Copyright Office, logged screenplays with the Writers Guild of America, and founded a company to help writers get credit for our work, including by helping them get verifiable artifacts of original creation. Here is some of what I know:

US Copyrights

You don’t need to file a copyright claim to have your written work protected by United States law — do not need to. Automatic protection exists the moment you create your work. It’s the default.

But not needing to, does not mean that you should not file for US Copyright protection.

Filing is not complicated. It can be done online in less than an hour and for less than $100. For filing on paper, however, it’s $125. By filing, and getting your copyrights, you can express intent to protect your work — that you were not simply giving it away. Disclosing a Copyright with a work tells others that you are serious about protecting your writing and creativity, and may be prepared to defend it.

Additionally, Copyright filings are date and time stamped. So, if someone later claims their work was not your work, showing that yours existed first, can be important.

Copyright in the AI Age, Other Limits

No matter what anyone tells you, it’s not entirely clear whether — or to what extent — AI-created content can be legally protected. Or who actually owns it.

The Office has put out Guidance. But there are numerous legal challenges pending in this area and any Guidance issued today can be changed tomorrow. The reality is that hard and fast rules about AI and US Copyrights won’t be set any time soon. Maybe AI-created text you submit will be protected, maybe it won’t be.

That does not mean that there’s no reason to file for Copyright protection. It does mean that, if you used AI in your writing, you should be honest with yourself about it and recognize that the status of your legal protection is unclear or, at best, may change.

What is unlikely to change is whether the US Copyright Office will issue Copyrights to original, human-written work. They always have. It’s impossible to consider that will change.

Also be aware that even a US Copyright with your pure, non-AI work won’t necessarily protect your work overseas. The US Copyright is not universal and additional filings, steps, or investments may be required to expand the reach of legal protection for your work.

Professional Registrations

Many areas of writing such as novels, screenplays, and other formats align with professional associations for the people who work and write in those formats. The Writers Guild (East and West), as an example, works with, and for, writers of screen and television material. The Authors Guild works with, and for, writers of books, primarily.

Both organizations offer filing and time-stamp services for writing, allowing someone to independently certify that a work existed in a specific format on a set day and time.

Filing with these professional organizations is also easy and inexpensive — minutes and less than $100. Discounts can be available for members as well. And the benefits of membership may be worth exploring anyway.

Generally, I’ve found that filing a work with the US Copyright Office and a professional association is redundant. But it can feel good to register with the Writers Guild, for example. And there’s no harm in it. When pressed to defend their work, no one has ever complained of having too much backup.

A caveat, however, with filing your work with professional associations is that a certificate from a professional association is only an artifact of existence. It does not, in any way, show that you actually made the thing, that you wrote it. It does not establish that you did not use AI. In most cases, professional organizations will not represent you in court, should a dispute arise. Further, professional associations do not decide anything, they are not a court. Can it help you prove that you had an idea and a screenplay five years ago? Yes. Will that prove that the idea is actually yours or that someone else took it? No.

Google Docs, Other Verifications of Time Creation

In the age of AI, where a mere accusation of using AI in your writing can be costly, many writers have suggested keeping a revision history of your work in Google Docs, which can show when a work was started, what changes were made, for how long, and so on.

Like filing your finished work with a professional association, there’s no harm in keeping a revision history in Google Docs. It cannot hurt. Should there be an issue, any evidence of creation can be helpful.

But not even a Google Doc history will be sufficient to absolutely prove original authorship and ownership because parts of Google Doc history can be faked. Not the date and time, but revision tracking can be manufactured. This means that a Google Doc history can support that something existed on a specific day and time, but it cannot entirely establish that the document itself was written by you, or by a human at all. This, in turn, can impact your standing in getting, or keeping, other legal protections.

Similarly, a few private companies offer services to record written work in a secure blockchain environment, with clear evidence of changes. Good news for these services is that they are harder to fake than Google Doc histories. Bad news is that they cost money. Not a ton, but they’re not free. Also downside, like Google Docs, blockchain solutions are time stamps, they cannot and do not prove ownership, authorship, or human authenticity.

Verifications of Authorship and Authenticity

Several companies and associations offer badges or certifications that written work is not created by AI, which, again, could be important in future legal settings. But by far most of them are not credible in that they will sell you — or give you — a badge if you simply promise you didn’t use AI, or promise that you wrote it yourself.

If you ever get in a situation where you need proof, those “I promise” badges won’t count for much, if anything at all. If there is no process, no independent inspection, no basis for the certification, it’s probably not of much value.

At the risk of being too self-promotional, that’s the value my company provides. Certifications of authentic human writing from Verify My Writing are based on inspection and a score. Independent certifications of human writing such as these can be helpful if you’re ever asked to prove, for example, that your work was not spit out by AI. Our process takes less than two minutes.

Further, our certifications are also independently time and date stamped, adding more evidence that your work existed first. Together, these can show that a document was created by hand, on or before a set day and time.

When you get something certified as human-written, as this article was, it looks like this:

A human-written hallmark from Verify My Writing for this exact article.

Scan the QR code to see the score and exact day and time it was scanned.

On the downside, our Certifications, like other registration and filing services, are not free.

Another limitation on our technology is that it cannot show who wrote the material. We can know a real person wrote it, and we can know when that happened, give or take. But that’s it. We cannot help prove that you wrote something, that you, in fact own it. That’s what courts decide.

Technology does exist that can help prove specific authorship — that you created it yourself. But also, not free. And these services require you to write in their software and store biometric data, such as keystroke patterns. They provide great evidence of content creation, by you, but they have drawbacks too.

Lock it Down

The best advice, if you’re worried about protecting the IP of your writing, is to get good advice. Consult a lawyer. Spending months or years of your life toiling, agonizing over every word in your work, laying your voice and emotion bare, is worth the few hundred dollars it may take to be sure that that labor and love won’t be stolen. Or, at least, to minimize the risk.

But if your work isn’t at that level, or you simply don’t want to, or cannot afford to seek legal advice, you have options. Most are easy, online, and relatively cheap.

Personally, when a work is important, I file it for Copyright protection. I used to file it with a professional association too, a practice I stopped doing once I started my company since we provide the same date and time stamp that the association would — plus evidence of human creation, which they don’t do.

Good luck out there. Keep writing. Keep creating. And be smart. Lock it down.