Googling any question regarding intellectual property provides a revealing litmus of where we stand these days on matters of copyright. Want to find out if you actually have to “remove offensive material” from a file-sharing site or “cease and desist” from making that game mod? Good luck finding the answers online.

What you’ll find instead is a collection of Web services seeking to profit from copyrighting or otherwise servicing your original work. So rather than answering questions of what you can do, one finds info on what you can’t do. This is meant not to inspire obedience to the current copyright culture, but rather instill enough concern to have one’s own work “properly protected” from “theft”, but only if you pay for such a service.

It’s no wonder IP law is up and coming; it’s all about convincing people that they need to add bureaucratic buffers to their works, when – in reality – the vast majority of works will never be stolen, and even if they are, it’s not because someone stole your cool idea to make Harry friggin’ Potter.

A recent presentation at a writer’s conference had an IP lawyer present on the nature of copyright. It was useful information, but the only part anyone heard was how much it costs. It’s $35 to copyright each work, and one writer noted: “But I might only get $25 for writing it, so why would I pay more to copyright it than what I’m getting paid for it?” A valid question for which the lawyer had no answer, just more insipid PowerPoint slides (all bearing a moronic copyright notice).

Whether any writer should knock out an article for $25 is not the question. What writers should ask themselves is: “What are the odds that this story – for which I worked to get $25 – is going to go on to be stolen, used elsewhere, and make more money than I was paid for it?” The answer, of course, is “near zero percent.”

The lawyer – much like the Google results for any IP question – kept reiterating that it’s your ability to sue for lawyer fees that makes copyrighting a work a sound idea. So this was, indirectly, a means of self-preservation for this IP lawyer, seeding in the malleable minds of the copyright poor, that they needed lawyers to protect their creative works. I don’t think that’s accurate. What you need as a writer is luck, persistence, and a taste for Ramon noodles.

This trend of convincing even the meanest of artists to spend their sparse income on copyrighting is little more than a perpetuation of the bureaucratic cycle that has chilled creativity from the top down since copyright law’s inception. Nothing more.