Copyright this!

A friend in a group I belong to asked me about copyright protection. He was hesitant to post photos because he had noted that there have been a few instances of our pictures being misappropriated. I told him to just label them as copyrighted anywhere he posted them if that was concerning him.

He asked about registering them with the copyright office. I told him I didn’t think it was worth the trouble because it wasn’t necessary for whatever protection the copyright actually provides.

That was pretty much that. Except, it elicited a memory.

It was my first job in publishing. “Writer’s Digest,” the magazine for aspiring writers. I had no experience in the publishing business, but they couldn’t afford to be too picky. The magazine had been around for fifty years and the numbers had been flat for some time.

The challenge was twofold. Magazine revenue usually comes from advertising, which means you must have strong and efficient access to a market someone wants to reach. Our “typical” reader was described to me as a middle-aged housewife pecking away at a typewriter on the dining room table and hoping to sell the great American romance novel. Who wants to invest any amount of ad budget to reach her?

The makers of household products, prepared foods, cosmetics, etc. you might think. Think again. They were already covering that market with much more efficient buys in mass media. They weren’t going to spend the higher per-thousand rate to appear in a niche publication that wasn’t relevant to their products.

Meeting that challenge is fodder for another blog. The second problem was acquiring subscribers, for which direct mail was the primary vehicle. Where do you find a mailing list for aspiring writers? If we were a camping magazine, I’d get the L.L. Bean catalog list. Sports car publication? Buy a list of car registrations, screened for targeted makes and models. But, what purchase identifies someone who goes home at night and raps out a story for a true confessions magazine? Answer: none.

They had been trying subscription lists of “intellectual” magazines and losing their butts in the process. Hiring me was, especially at my then-tender age, probably the equivalent of throwing their hands in the air. Get someone cheap and tell him to control the bleeding as best he can.

I don’t buy into low expectations. There’s always a way.

I pulled some of the veterans into a room and asked for every modifier that described our typical reader. I kept them in there until we hit triple figures. Not the best way to make new friends.

Ninety-nine answers were of no help. Didn’t matter. I found my one. Paranoid.

Even though most of these hopeful authors could barely write well enough to fill out a rebate form, they shared a fear that unctuous editors would reject their manuscripts, steal their ideas and make millions with them. I suppose that’s possible. But, in all my subsequent years in publishing, I never met an editor who was that industrious.

So, why did that jump out at me and how does it help? If my preamble registered with you, you’re way ahead of me.

A spinster in Keokuk hammers out a steamy novel about a sultry spy who plies her trade by seducing every highly placed government official between Paris and Moscow. Who would know better about that stuff?

More to the point, what’s the first thing she does to protect her potboiler? She registers it with the copyright office. And how does that help me? Those are public records, including the names and addresses of the writers.

Understand, this was just my theory at that point. I needed to confirm it by testing the list or, at the very least, eyeballing it. I called the U.S. Copyright Office and asked for a list of the last 10,000 people to register manuscripts. There was a pregnant silence.

They didn’t have list, just the records, on paper. This was the 1970s. No computer had found its way into their offices. I asked a few more questions to assess the precise nature of the situation, but it became apparent there was only one way to accomplish this. I booked a flight to DC.

I entered the building, stated my business and was led into a cavernous space. It was like the government artifact storage scene from “Indiana Jones.” Miles and miles of high shelves and boxes, or so it seemed. Okay, give me a hint. Where do I find what I need?

“What are you looking for?” Easy, manuscripts. Not so easy. “You want text. Would that be published or unpublished text? Manuals, advertising, scripts, recipes….” Whoa, whoa. I gave a concise description of what I was looking for to the woman who looked like everyone’s idea of a high school librarian. She rolled her eyes to the high ceiling to contemplate this for a few seconds and then motioned me to follow her with a brusque wave of her arm.

She strode purposefully for maybe half a mile (okay, maybe a little less), stopped abruptly and pointed at a long shelf of file boxes a bit higher than eye level. I yanked one out and gravity caught me by surprise. It was densely packed.

I popped the lid and pulled out the first file. It was a thesis on applying multivariant analysis to something I didn’t know or care about. “This isn’t it.” I described something a little more “flowery,” for lack of a better term. She wordlessly indicated that I should first replace the carton, which weighed a little less than a Buick, and led me and my hernia down some more dark passages.

Mercifully, this shelf was waist high. The first file was the copyright for “Ode to the Poor Skunk I Ran Over on the Way Home from Bingo.” I had found my people. Now, how do I capture the data?

I ask Ms. Prim if I or my designated agents could use her copier. She said it was government property and electricity, and the expenditure couldn’t be made for private usage. I offered to pay for the copies. No. I offered to overpay for the copies. No, again. I offered to bring in my own copier. No, I would still be using government electricity and taking up government space. I’d overpay for that, giving them a net surplus. No. I tried a dozen more creative solutions. No dice.

So, I went over her head. That led to less listening and more emphatic rejections. Okay, there’s no problem that can’t be solved.

All I needed at this point was a test list. I went around to local colleges and posted money-making- opportunity flyers. This is no small feat to pull off because not a lot of students of DC colleges feel a need to work. But, it worked. I amassed a small army to go in, hand copy the data and get paid by the name. The information came to me in Cincinnati where I had it keystroked into a usable file format. The test list worked gangbusters and the rest, as they say (whoever they are – and, the expression isn’t copyrighted), is history.

One sidebar, if you will permit. While I was there, I wandered the stacks, amazed at the variety of materials that was copyrighted. Wallpaper patterns? Who knew? Certainly not me. Had never given it a thought.

So, I made a bunch of money off that adventure. Which gives me an idea. I just registered sign copy: “Stop,” “School Crossing, “etc. Should make millions!