What must you include in your copyright notice?
Copyright 2020 by Jennifer Reinoehl
Yep. That is all you must have. Still people like to write more. They feel that they must make it clear that no one else is allowed to copy their work. The problem is that the people who are writing these extended copyright notices are not lawyers and have not copied the notice word-for-word from a traditionally published book.
Now, I know what you are thinking with that last statement- Whoa, Jennifer, are you encouraging me to plagiarize!?!?!?! Guess what? General legal contracts cannot be copyrighted. There is a reason why the copyright statements look almost identical across traditional publishers. As long as it contains legal phrases with very specific meanings and is general in nature, you can copy it. Now, yes, I have a rather unique copyright statement in some of my educational books, so don't copy those (or any other copyright that looks non-traditional, especially those written from scratch by other authors), but in general, unless you are a copyright lawyer, you should not under any circumstances try to change the traditional notice.
The above--name, date, and copyright claim using the word "copyright" or its symbol, is all you need and that is the main thing I recommend. Copying a traditional, general copyright statement to further clarify is okay, but not required. Writing your own copyright notice that goes beyond either of these things is actually dangerous for you. For example, in one recent homemade copyright notice, the "author" assigned the rights of the book to me. That is right. It stated that all rights were given to the author, and since I was the actual author I got all my rights back the second that book was published. If I had not caught this and/or if I would be less scrupulous, I could have legally sued the person for publishing my work.
I have also seen authors write copyrights in such a way that the book could not be used in a library. I do not think they meant to do this, but they did. Legalese is a very specific area of writing that is best left to lawyers. If you are not the type of person who reads website terms of service and software terms of service every time you download something new or create a new user account on a website, then you should not try to write your own notice. Since a simple notice gives you the same protection as a detailed one, and since you can copy a detailed one from any traditionally published book you want, why try to create your own and risk destroying your own rights or the chance of your book being used in a library?
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