Hello everyone, I hope all is well with you. I’ve had a busy week with work and writing. I’ve got one manuscript off to an editor and I’m tweaking another one and I just came up with an idea for a third story that I’m going to start plotting out this week. Inspiration never sleeps. It’s either feast or famine.
Today, I want to touch on writing. I haven’t written a post about writing in a long time, and something happened this week that inspired me to write this. It’s not a Christmasy type of post, so I apologize for that. It involves intellectual property theft.
The definition of Intellectual Theft is below:
Intellectual property theft is when someone steals an idea, creative expression, or invention from an individual or a company.
This happens in the writing community as well, and publishers spend thousands of dollars to fight it. It isn’t just outright plagiarism. It can be the theft of an idea. For example, let’s say you belong to a writing group, and someone is writing a story about a drug addict. Then someone else in that group decides to write a story about a drug addict, copying that idea. Even though the stories are different it is still a form of intellectual property theft.
Now, some may argue there are no new ideas. I disagree. There are always new ideas especially with the way technology has evolved over the years. So, protect your ideas, keep your manuscripts even the old ones so you have documentation of when they were created.
With the invention of AI this could muddy the waters profoundly. We’ve already had incidents where someone created a story using AI and put a famous author’s name as the creator of the work on it just to sell copies. Insidious people have made money doing this. It’ll be interesting to see how major distributors handle this situation going forward. How about you? Do you have any ideas? Leave a comment! I’d love to hear from you!