Ever
since I published my mystery, The McHenryInheritance, in July, I’ve been cultivating two fantasies about how the
book might make me rich in a hurry.
The
first is that some Hollywood big shot will find it on Amazon, love it, and buy
the movie rights for an astronomical amount of money. That hasn’t happened yet,
but I’ll let you know when it does.
My
second fantasy comes courtesy of my intellectual property attorney. Among other
things, he recommended registering the copyright for the book with the U.S.
copyright office. There are a number of reasons for doing so, but one of the
better ones is that if the copyright is registered (cost $35), any infringement
of said copyright carries a statutory liability of $150,000 per violation. That
would be a return of $4,285.71 on each dollar invested in the copyright —better
than Bain Capital.
Dealing With the Federal Government
As
far as I know, no one has violated the copyright yet, but hope springs eternal.
In order to secure this protection, however, I had to deal with the federal
government, and we all know what that means. Or do we?
Actually,
dealing with the copyright office was pretty easy. You go online, and the forms
are right there, along with clear and simple explanations of how to use them.
You can call up a PowerPoint presentation that will walk you through the
process, or you can look at a video tutorial that does the same thing.
It
can all be done on the computer in less than an hour and paid for by credit
card. Then they e-mail you a confirmation and a packing slip to enclose when
you send them two copies of the item being copyrighted. It’s that easy, and
leaves you feeling, if only momentarily, that the federal government is your
friend.
(There
was one bit of dissonance, however. The copyright office asks that you don’t
send the copyrighted materials by registered mail, but use FedEx instead. I
know the Postal Service isn’t technically a federal program any more, but it
used to be family, and you’d think the copyright office would show it a little
more love.)
Dealing With the Private Sector
Dealing
with the copyright office stood in stark contrast to an experience we had a day
later, with the web site of a prominent American company. Linda saw a story on
CNN that there had been a recall of Kellogg’s Frosted Mini-Wheats owing to a
more than acceptable number of metal shards making it into some batches of the
cereal. Given that our son considers said product one of the basic food groups,
there was a definite local angle.
Linda
went to the Kellogg’s web site, which had a much snappier and livelier home
page than the copyright office. What it didn’t have was any useful information.
Nowhere on the home page did the words “product recall” appear, so she clicked
for the news page. That took her to a bunch of happy-clappy press releases that
had nothing to do with the recall.
After
noodling around a while, she found the recall information under a heading that
no ordinary person would think of looking under. The information was
incomplete, which required more noodling around for a customer service number and
a call to get a human being (at least there was one!) who verified that our
stash of Mini-Wheats was indeed safe. A lot of wasted time, and we couldn’t
help feeling that if the federal government had been running that web site,
we’d have had our answer in three minutes.
