this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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If I decide to self-publish a book what happens to the copyright? Is there a way to prevent others from claiming copyrights for a book published autonomously? Are there OS licenses specifically tuned for books?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

If you write something, you own the copyright, period. There's no registration process or anything like that. If you made it, it's yours, legally. And the only process involved to exercise your legal rights would just be proving that you're actually the one who made it.

Of course, none of that makes it certain that no one will claim it as their own or use it for something you don't want. As a general rule, just assume that anything you don't want used in a way you don't like simply shouldn't be put out into the public at all, regardless of what kind of license you package with it. If you're an average person and not a billionaire good luck exercising any kind of legal rights for intangible stuff like written words.

It is generally a good idea to include with anything you put out there some kind of license, which could be as simple as a .txt file that says "Made by [name], free to use for xyz purposes with abc caveats"

For a book stuff like that can go into the first or last couple pages that usually include all sorts of random boring information and publisher credits and whatnot

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

You do have to prove you wrote it. Nothing does this better than owning the credentials to an account with your name and posting it publicly on GitHub, Internet Archive, or similar