Email Yourself To Protect Your Own Copyright
Email yourself a copy or document of your work, which you want protected by a copyright. Do this before you ever post it online, or anywhere else! You will then see a time-stamp at the corner of your email. This is what helps protect your work, only if it hasn’t appeared anywhere else but in the email you sent to yourself. The time-stamp proves that you made or wrote that work, because it is the first known date and incidence. Much like guessing an outcome, knowing that it will be right, but you don’t want to say anything publicly because you are afraid that if you are wrong that you won’t like what other people say about you, and your prediction came true, how would anyone know whether you predicted that before the event, or if you watched the event unfold? This is the basic functioning of an Emailer’s Copyright, to prove you made the work before anyone else!
There is nothing worse than having to spend around $25 bucks to register your own work, especially if you are a regular creator or content provider, who has to worry about registering each work when you don’t have the time, nor the money to even pull this off! But now is different, now you are doing this for free, without ever having to use a “poor man’s copyright”! A poor man’s copyright, for those of you who do not know, is where you put your written document or your materials into a mailing envelope, then you mail it to yourself. First of all, it’s rather easy to fake this process, because you could just have your envelope time-stamped, then afterward put anything you want in it, even if it’s something different that wasn’t originally intended in that mail envelope!
An Emailer’s Copyright could very well hold up in court, if you have the emails at hand or that you may have printed. You would have to alert the judge ahead of time to let them know you are bringing an electronic or digital device, by telling them the devices are what holds the proof of the copyright infringement. If you don’t alert the judge, it raises concerns for getting your device into the courtroom, especially past security, and if the judge thinks you are trying to play on it while in court. Save your emails that you send to yourself, preferably in a folder called “Copyrights”, as these will always be around, and you should also have your emails printed out after you send them to yourself!