Short answer: You can't. Not if you've told anyone. If an idea is in print, or posted online anywhere, it's fair game to the whole world. Not even a copyright notice will help you. This is because ideas can't be copyrighted; only specific expressions of ideas can.

Case in point. When the Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying game first came out, it featured characers called Hobbits, Balrogs and Ents. Tolkien Enterprises successfully sued them for using characters from out of The Lord of the Rings, but all that did was make them change the names to Halflings, Balors and Treants. Pint-sized humanoids, giant flame demons and walking trees aren't copyrightable; only the names of these characters are.

Now for the Good News

This whole "ideas can't be copyrighted" business is actually a Good Thing. Because if ideas could be copyrighted, a lot more screenwriters and novelists would be out of a job.

Imagine if Tolkien had copyrighted "Epic High Fantasy." Stephen King noted, in his On Writing, that people couldn't get enough of Tolkien's hobbits and fantasy stories. So they had to read his awkward, disjointed prequel, The Silmarillion; and from there they had to go on to stories like Terry Brooks' Sword of Shannara, and a whole slew of high fantasy novels. Novels that would have never seen print, any more than your budding story about a fellowship of heroes who band together to fight the Dark Lord.

George Lucas could have sued to stop Battlestar Galactica. Gene Roddenberry's estate could have shut down Stargate SG-1. Anyone with a lawyer could have sued you, and all the aspiring writers out there. And the person who'd patented the Happy Ending would have made a fortune, at the expense of all other writers (and of good fiction everywhere).

This is actually how things work in the computer industry. There, snippets of programming code can be patented, so that nobody else can use them without paying a royalty. Some companies do nothing but patent things, then hunt down people who came up with the ideas on their own and sue them for all they're worth. Ask a techie friend about software patents sometime, or read Ben Klemens' Math You Can't Use.

How to Really Keep Your Ideas from Being Stolen

It's simple. Just don't tell anyone your ideas. You don't want to tell people your ideas, anyway, because the more you go on about them the harder it'll be to convince your brain that it's time to write the actual story. It'll feel like it's already written it, and it won't want to write it again.

Once your idea's been written into a story, the story is yours and is copyrightable. And someone else could try to copy its theme and feel exactly, but it's more likely that they'll use your writing as inspiration ... just as you've been inspired by all the authors that you've read.

The Upshot

The ideas of "Space Opera," "Epic High Fantasy," and even "Detective Mystery" have been explored and written about over and over again, because they remain compelling to readers. And every new author has something that he or she can bring to the table, some background or way of telling a story that's different from everyone else's.

Your method of telling a story is something that others can't copy ... and if they try, it'll just read like a copy, so they will get panned by critics who have already read your book. But ideas themselves are inherently Open Source. Ask a techie friend about that, too.

*Contributed by Jared Spurbeck, on Associated Content , Originally published Aug 13, 2008