Protect My IP

[hixopolis]

As a newb to the service, I am looking for a proofreader and book formatting. My question is, how do i protect myself from theft of the contents of my book?

Is there a source of documents to protect both sellers and buyers?

 

[uk1000]

You could probably register the copyright of it with the US copyright office - though that's probably usually only for completed work.

You could register it with the writers guild of America, which might be cheaper than the US copyright office, but will only give you 5 years of legal evidence.

If you upload it to Fiverr on the order page then Fiverr will have a copy (that could be used for proof later), though it's possible they could remove it after some time so it probably wouldn't be permanently there (someone on the forum recently who was a buyer couldn't access their recently completed order page but maybe that bug has been fixed. But Fiverr might not show files from orders from years ago (though you could ask Fiverr about that).

You could ask the seller(s) to sign an NDA (though you could check with Fiverr for the rules on that).

For proofreading you could split the document/book and get it proof-read by multiple sellers if you think it's risky allowing a seller to see the whole work. eg. you could get 1 seller to proofread all odd-numbered pages and a different seller to proofread all even numbered pages. Though there might be problems doing it that way (eg. consistency).

Maybe you could do the book formatting yourself or maybe split that (but then each seller might do it differently).

You could store it somewhere online that keeps a record of the date & time it was stored (though writer's guild of America will do that, but just for 5 years).

It might not be too much of a risk, but after ordering you could do regular plagiarism checks online with text from your book so you could be told as soon after someone did copy it to a particular website, so that you could then do something about that (eg. report it). Maybe you could set up something that emailed you as soon as some text from your book was found online (eg. a Google Alert or something better than that).

Also if you did get those tasks done with Fiverr sellers, you could get the book published as soon after the orders were completed as possible (after you checked them), so that the book publishing site would have a copy of it.

Maybe there's a way to encrypt the book and store it using blockchain tech, which could give proof if needed later.

If you're going to publish through Amazon KDP you could also probably store your current draft of it there, and if so that might help with proof if needed later (if someone did copy it before it was published by you).

Edited January 2 by uk1000