Posts Tagged ‘news’
There are many reasons why you might want to find out if you have an arrest warrant out for your arrest. You may also want to find out if someone else has any arrest warrants outstanding as well. Babysitters, prospective employees, suspicious neighbors, or really anyone else you may want to see if they have had any run-ins with the law recently. Luckily, there are some resources available to you, and you don’t have to have a reason why you’re performing a warrant search…
If you want to perform a free arrest warrant check on anyone, even yourself, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that you can do this for free at your local courthouse, as the information is not confidential and must be made available in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act. The bad news is that if you aren’t looking up your own information, you must have a good, justifiable reason for doing so. Many times, even the fact that you’re a prospective employer isn’t a good enough excuse. So you may not be able to look it up, depending on the attitude of the court clerk at the time.
On top of that, an even bigger issue is that you will only be looking within the jurisdiction of the court. For example, if you are looking in a certain county, the person may have an arrest warrant outstanding in a neighboring county and you’ll never know. There is no publicly available, free, searchable, national database that you can look in that will show all of the arrest warrants outstanding for a person.
It is absolutely essential that all screenwriters looking to profit from their work have an understanding of copyright law. If the legal procedures necessary to protect your work are not undertaken, it will be impossible to prove that your work is your own. Luckily, the proper procedures are easy to understand and execute.
The first fact about copyrighting that any screenwriter should be aware of is a piece of good news – the government is on your side. Under United Kingdom law, any original work is automatically placed under copyright as soon as it is recorded in any form. Thus, by simply putting your work down on paper, whether it be a screenplay, a treatment, or simply an idea, you are instantly protected under copyright law. The idea belongs to you, and it is illegal for any other individual to pass it off as his or her own.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that unless you take further measures, it will be very difficult to prove that this work is in fact your own. For, even though it has been copyrighted, one must still obtain sufficient proof that he or she actually created the work in question.
What methods are necessary to obtain such proof has been a point of contention among screenwriters for years. One long-standing industry rumor claims that all a writer must do to assert ownership over a work is to, upon completion, send a copy to him or herself through the mail. This is false. In reality, further measures are necessary in order to officially register a work as your own.