When you copyright a fiction story does the characters, characters description, and name all copyrighted?

Question

By this I mean if the story is copyright, are the caharacters too. Mainly the names and visual description of the character.

Answer 1

Yes and no.

First of all, it bears mention that something is copyrighted the second it's written down. So it's not like you really 'copyright' something... it already has that protection. The only reason to take any effort to have official involvment is to prove exactly when something is copyrighted in a legal way, which can help against a claim from someone who says he wrote something first. Usually there's not much point.

Second, although a copyright does extend to characters and locations in a story, it is only to the TOTALITY of such. You can NEVER copyright a name. Put that thought right out of your head. But if someone writes a story with your character's name, appearance, background, and abilities, or even a substantial enough portion of those that they can arguably be mistaken, then you might have something.

So if you like, it's perfectly legal to write a story about Sherlock Holmes... as long as Sherlock is an aging truck driver and not a British crime-solver. This complete exception to names extends from the simple fact that there are real people out there with names too. And even if you try to completely avoid any kind of naming similarity, it's just darn near impossible to succeed. No court in the world is willing to give fictional creations control over real people in this way. Personally, I can't say I disagree.

Your best protection of all is to have your work published. If it's a half-decent publisher at all, they'll sue the daylights out of anyone who tries to infringe on their profits and save you the trouble. Plus it's hard to beat an actual printed copy for proof of copyright, much less thousands of them.

Answer 2

It depends on how closely someone uses the description of your character in your story and how famous your work is. The more famous and the closer it is the better chance you have of claiming copyright infringement.

Let me explain further:

First, names cannot be trademarked, and anything that can be trademarked (i.e. such as a short phrase) is not copyrightable.

On the other end of this spectrum story ideas and concepts are not protected by copyright and you have no claim against anyone who takes your concept further in development and refinement.

Copyrights live between these two extremes. A good creative healthy paragraph (for example a short poem or a detailed description of a character) is definitely copyrightable and would be infringed if someone copied it verbatim.

Given these facts your question now becomes what changes can a person make to a paragraph in order to avoid infringement ?

The answer to this question depends on four facts: the text of your paragraph, the text of their paragraph, how famous you are, and how famous the paragraph (or the work containing the paragraph) is (or becomes as a result of someone else using it!).

Also if you have already have relationship with the alleged infringer then you have a much stronger case but not under copyright law. For instance, the recently deceased humorist and writer Art Buchwald successfully sued Paramount Pictures for stealing his story idea to make "Coming to America" an Eddie Murphy film. But the case was not a copyright case, it was a breach of contract case as Art Buchwald was under contract as a writer for the studio.

Good Luck

Answer 3

Dont copyright anything. Save yourself the 45 bucks. You own the story the minute you write it. Copyrighting shows agents and publishers that you are an amateur and dont know the publishing business. Get yourself a copy of Writers Markets and read about copyrights. Titles, character names etc cannot be copyrighted. If it is published, your publisher takes care of copyrighting. C.