Every screenplay draws on one of four things: something you invented, something someone else wrote that you have licensed, something old enough that nobody owns it any more, or something that actually happened. The first is free and unrestricted. The other three have rules, and the rules decide whether your finished script is a film or an expensive private document.
This is worth an afternoon of your time before you spend six months writing. The order matters: check first, write second. Plenty of good scripts exist that can never be made because the writer found out about rights in year two.
This is a general explanation of how the categories work, not legal advice, and the specifics vary a great deal by country. Before you option anything or spend real money, talk to someone qualified in your jurisdiction.
Category one: original work
You made it up. You own it from the moment you write it down. Nothing to clear, nobody to ask.
Most first films are here and should be. Original work is the only category with no gate in front of it, which matters enormously when you have no money.
One caveat worth knowing: copyright protects the expression of an idea, never the idea itself. Nobody owns "a heist goes wrong" or "two strangers meet on a train". If your film shares a premise with an existing one, that alone is not a problem. It becomes a problem when you have taken the specific sequence of events, the characters, and the scenes, rather than the concept.
Category two: adaptation
You want to film a novel, a short story, a play, a comic, a podcast, an article, or a video game. Somebody owns it. You need their permission in writing before you shoot, and realistically before you write.
The instrument for this is usually an option agreement: you pay for the exclusive right to develop the material for a fixed period, with an agreed price to actually buy the rights if the film gets made.
How options normally work:
- Term. Typically 12 or 18 months, often with the right to extend once for a further payment.
- Option fee. What you pay now. For an unknown author or a small property this can be modest, and for a short story by a first-time author it is sometimes nominal. For anything with a profile it is not.
- Purchase price. What you pay if you exercise the option and make the film, frequently expressed as a percentage of the final budget with a floor and a ceiling.
- Scope. Which rights, which media, which territories, how long, and whether sequels, series, and remakes are included.
- Credit and consultation. What the author is called on screen and whether they get to read drafts.
Chain of title is the unbroken paper record showing that the rights travelled cleanly from the original author to you. Every financier, distributor, and insurer will ask for it, and a gap anywhere in the chain stops the film cold, sometimes years later when it is far more expensive to fix. Keep every signed document, keep them together, and never rely on an email exchange as a substitute for a signature.
Short stories are the underrated route. They are cheaper to option than novels, often better suited to a short or a first feature, and many authors are genuinely pleased to be asked. Literary magazines are full of material by writers who have never had a film enquiry. Writing a polite, specific email costs nothing.
What you cannot do: write the adaptation first and get permission later. Sometimes it works out. Often the rights are already gone, and you have written a script you can never legally show anyone.
Category three: public domain
Works whose copyright has expired belong to everyone. You can adapt them freely, with no permission and no payment.
This is real and it is genuinely useful. It is also where confident beginners get caught, because the rules are less simple than "it's old".
The traps:
Duration varies by country. In much of the world copyright runs for the author's life plus 70 years, but the term, and the way it is calculated, differs by jurisdiction and by when the work was published. A work in the public domain where you live may still be protected where you want to distribute.
Editions and translations have their own copyright. The original 19th century Russian novel may be free. The 2015 English translation you actually read is a separate copyrighted work with a living translator. Adapt from the translation and you have adapted a protected work.
Adaptations of public domain works are protected. Everyone can film the original fairy tale. Nobody can borrow the specific characters, songs, and inventions that a studio added to their version of it. The distinction is usually clear if you go back to the source text and stay there, and dangerous if you are working from memory of a film you saw as a child.
Trademarks do not expire. A character can be out of copyright while their name and image are still an active trademark for merchandise. These are separate systems with separate rules.
Real people in old works. A public domain text about a person still living, or recently dead, does not remove the separate questions covered in the next category.
The safe procedure is boring and effective: work from a specific edition you have verified, note the publication date and the author's death date, check the term in every country you plan to distribute in, and write down what you checked.
Category four: true stories
Facts are not copyrightable. Nobody owns what happened. But the moment you put real, identifiable, living people on screen you are in a different legal area entirely, and it is not copyright.
The two real risks:
Defamation. Depicting a living person doing something they did not do, in a way that damages their reputation, in a manner audiences would take as fact.
Privacy. Disclosing private facts about a person that are not of legitimate public concern, even where those facts are entirely true.
Both vary enormously by jurisdiction. Some countries are far more protective of individuals than others, and the country you distribute in can matter as much as the country you shoot in.
Life rights are the usual solution. Strictly, a person cannot copyright their own life, so you are not buying copyright. What you are buying is cooperation, access to their account and their materials, and, most valuably, an agreement not to sue you. That last part is why financiers and insurers ask for life rights even when the story could technically be told without them.
When you can proceed without them: matters of genuine public record involving public figures acting in their public capacity, handled carefully. Historical figures long dead. Composite or fictionalized characters who are not identifiable as any single real person.
When you cannot, practically speaking: private individuals, anyone portrayed unflatteringly, and anything where the interesting material came from something other than the public record. Note that "practically speaking" is doing real work in that sentence. Errors and omissions insurance, which distributors require, is where an unclear rights position usually surfaces.
A working order of operations
- Decide which of the four categories your idea is in. Be honest, because "inspired by" is a category, not an exemption.
- If it is anything but original, find out who controls the rights before you outline.
- Ask. A short, specific, polite email to an author or their agent is free and is answered more often than people expect.
- Get everything in writing, signed, and filed in one place.
- Only then start writing.
The version of this that goes wrong is always the same: someone writes a wonderful script, falls in love with it, and discovers the gate at the end rather than the beginning. Checking first costs an afternoon. Checking last costs the film.
Next
You know where the material came from and what you are allowed to do with it. Next: what you actually own once you have written it, and whether registering a script does anything useful.
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