The pilot for “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” cost $85 to make.
I was actually going to say that, not only should you make the pilot, but you should make a few episodes and put it on the Internet. If your idea is good, people will start giving you contributions, and eventually some big wig will offer to take it off your hands, if you get popular enough.
That’s the only way I’ve seen Joe Blow off the street get a TV show.
Who’s this Ty you keep referring to?
Anyway, poor man’s copyright is a joke. It’s never been upheld in a court. Never. Everybody who knows anything about copyright has made it their life’s work to stomp the notion out of the language.
Once more for the archives. Ideas are worthless. They are not protectable. They’re not even valuable. Full-fledged proposals have value, but they are like the difference between a idea for a skyscraper and the building plans for a skyscraper.
Your full proposal is not only copyrightable, but is in fact copyrighted as soon as you set it into tangible form. You can register the copyright online at copyright.gov for $35 and that will give you protection that is legally enforceable in court. It will never go that far, of course, but it’s real.
It depends a
It depends a lot on the OP’s exact idea. Let’s assume he came up with the idea of this show where people compete in some remote place for things like comfort food and such (I believe it’s “survivor” in the USA, but I’m not sure). I can’t see him being able to produce a pilot on the cheap…
Well…thinking twice, in fact I’m wrong and you’re right. He could film some episodes with a team of friends in some isolated place, like, say, a forest, in his home state.
How original does it have to be? “American Idol” -it’s a talent show. Almost every reality show is an elimination contest. The contestants / judges / audience / contest result votes off the next loser. You can’t copyright an idea. The similarity would have to be pretty broadly the same, pretty specific and pretty eerie before you’ll win in court.
Like most reality shows, that sounds gross.
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