by Sandra Fikes

Created on: March 09, 2010   Last Updated: March 10, 2010

The Poor Man's Copyright is a bit of a myth in that it is not actually worth anything more than a false sense of security for the possessor of the material.

Why do I say it is a false sense of security? Because if you were to try to actually prove that you had created a work using the poor man's copyright, you would quickly learn that it is so unreliable that I know of no instances where it has ever been successfully used to prove copyright of any work.

So, if you do desire to use the Poor Man's Copyright, how do you do it?

• Complete your work and place it into an envelope. Seal the envelope and address it to yourself.
• Mail the sealed envelope with your work inside of it to yourself.
• When you get the envelope back, leave it sealed and put it away in a safe location in case you ever need it.

Now, the first flaw that one might see in this procedure is that it would be very easy for someone to mail themselves an empty envelope. Once it is returned to them they can set it aside to wait until they have something to place inside of it. This allows a copyright to be falsified by days, weeks, even years.

A logical solution to that might be to burn a disk on the date that you seal it into the envelope so that you can have the Post Office stamp the post mark for the same day as the disk's time stamp. This too is a flawed system. You could easily mail yourself a blank disk in an unsealed envelope which would be ready to have a new disk placed into it when you want to.

Ah, you say, but the time stamp! This too is easily overcome. There was once a time when software relied on the computer's internal clock to let it know when a trial period had expired. It was fairly common knowledge that someone could evade this expiration date by setting the computer's clock to a past date when the software was still within its trial period.

This same technique can be used when burning a disk to trick the computer into burning a disk that has a date from the past burned onto it.

This would obviously be a technique that would be best used within a few days or months rather than years, but it is still a easy go-around on falsifying a document using the poor man's copyright.

So, if this is such an unreliable means of copyrighting ones work, where did it originate?

I'm not sure. I have looked around online, and the answers to this vary widely. I heard about the poor man's copyright years ago when I first started writing, so it has been around since the dark ages, but where

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