Hooookay:
As Steve rightly pointed out, lawsuits are out of the question until the aforementioned publisher pays his $35 (or whatever it is, in his country of origin). In the US, no $35, no lawsuit, period.
Secondly, the copyright symbol is UTTERLY unnecessary, as is the copyright declaration inside the book, but it's tradition.
A copyright in the USA "vests" the moment you've completed
writing the work. An idea--like an outline, or a TOC--is not a "work." It's a partial work at BEST. As someone else here said, it's the execution, the actual book--not the idea behind the book. As others posted, you can have the same ideas as other people, but your book won't be the same as his book, and so on. Honestly, I don't think that the Copyright Office would even accept a TOC/Outline, only.
Don't confuse REGISTRATION of the copyright for when it vests. It vests upon completion; but registration is necessary for a lawsuit to be FILED. (And there are other legal considerations, as well, vis-a-vis damages; if you can afford it, file it. Don't be fooled into nonsensical garbage like "the poor man's copyright" and all that bollix.
Worthless as a basis for a lawsuit.)
Yes, you can trademark things like titles, characters, and so on. Hogwarts, Harry Potter, and the like. But the general idea--child wizard goes to special wizarding school--and the concomitant "Hero's Journey" is not copyrightable. If you write the book, that's copyrightable.
This is one of those topics (asserting copyrights, trying to prevent "friends" and the like from "stealing" your stuff) that tends to really get up my nose, not because of Arjaybee's friend, or his friend's grandiosity, etc., but we get this type of crap ALL the time. We get manuscripts submitted, so covered with watermarks, "confidential" all over it, and so on--the people sending them obviously don't realize that were I the nefarious sort, I could remove those with two clicks. OR, I get the ubiquitous "will you sign an NDA?," question, which for me, is a tooth-gritter, as the implication is pretty g*ddamn insulting. (
Not to mention--I could count on one hand the number of books that I've seen, in a decade, of the 5K that I've quoted, that I'd remotely consider "worth" stealing, were I so inclined.) It's just sooooooo irritating, that people think that their ideas are soooooo valuable.
Not to mention--if they sent their precious manuscripts, to agents and publishers, did they mark those as "confidential?" Did they ask the agent or publisher for an NDA? Of course not--so it's only book formatters, apparently, that are utterly untrustworthy, even if they sent it out to 100 unknown agents on the Net,
whose entire set of credentials amount to "has a website."
My bogglement about why authors don't understand the concept of "piracy:"
And before anyone says "oh, but, did you see that story..." yes, of course, I've read the story--a few--about authors who discovered that their works had indeed been truly ripped-off; some wanna-be found their book, read it, loved it, and "homaged" it. In other words, rewrote the location, the scenes, the characters' names and appearance, and published it. Hell, may have even started out as a writing exercise, and then descended into crookery.
But FOLKS, that has been a real thing, forever. We can all recall seeing allegations like this, decades ago, long before Amazon. Before, it was harder for someone to do that, because basically, all books passed through gatekeepers--and
now they don't. Now, we are dependent upon the "New Gatekeepers," aka, Amazon customers, to find them--and I would take heart, were I an author,
that they ARE being found. That, to me, is the
remarkable thing--not that it
happens.
I mean, for the love of...how many romancey vampire books, came out, on the heels of Twifright? How many romancey werewolf books? (Not to mention, apparently, mountains of supernatural porn.) How many wizard books emerged, post-Harry? There is never a lack of emulators, once someting is successful, and the other truth is, when people discover a new niche, they want MORE in that niche, so in some ways, the emulators are serving a purpose. People discover Harry Dresden...and they want more urban paranormal mysteries. If there's only Harry, they're going to be disappointed after consuming his backlist of books. Ditto any other enormously successful series or genre or oeuvre by X.
Anyone here ever see that movie, "White House Down?" (I hope that I remembered the right title--there were two very similar movies released the same year, but I think it's this one--it's this
or Olympus Has Fallen.) Apparently moderately successful, or something? (Had a sequel, I see.)
It's "Under Siege," remade. No argument. You can watch US, and then watch WHD, and you can predict the scenes, the beats, even the DIALOGUE. Hell, if the WHD people didn't pay fees to the screenwriters, etc., for US, I'd be
shocked. Same exact movie--different lead, different setting, but nearly damn verbatim.
I watched a movie the other night (sad for me,
believe me) that was "Die Hard," in a different setting. {shrug}. Not as blatant a lift as "WHD," but damn near.
It is ever thus--not everybody has great ideas. Some folks' "great ideas" are reimaginings, (cough cough) of someone else's idea--great, mediocre, or otherwise.
:-)
Hitch