Is it legal to put copyright on your work?

Who owns the copyright in this situation?

• Fifteen years ago, my friend and I were hanging out one night when I told a funny story that happened to me earlier that day. After I finished telling the story, my friend remarked that it would make a funny premise for a movie, and we then spent the rest of the night talking about different scenes that would be funny scenarios in the movie. We were both in our late teens, and neither of us were writers, so we never wrote out any action scenes or dialogue and we simply talked about different ideas that would be hilarious. Several years ago, I began to write short stories for my own pleasure, and I mentioned to my friend that I would like to write a screenplay of our idea. I asked him if he would like to help me write the story, but he said he was too busy to do it and that he wasn't interested. He then told me that I could write the story on my own. I put it off for a couple of years, and I only began to write the screenplay about six months ago. Because I was in the initial stages of the writing process, I asked my friend two more times whether he wanted to help me write the screenplay, and he once again declined. When I wrote out all the ideas that we had come up with 15 years ago it only generated 8 pages of material, and all the action scenes and dialogue was written solely by me. The final draft that I recently completed comes to 102 pages, and excluding the 8 pages of material that we originally conceived together, the remainder of the story is my own ideas that I wrote dialogue and scenes for. However, when I told my friend that I had completed the screenplay he made a comment which implied that he believed we had created the screenplay together and that we would have joint copyright of the story. I was shocked because he had not lifted a finger in the past 15 years to develop or write the story, and he had not even provided any new ideas to the story while I was writing it. I realized that he believed having generated some of the scenes and scenarios in the movie, which are nothing but ideas, gave him copyright ownership, but from my understanding that is not correct. The U.S. Copyright Law states that ideas and concepts are not protected by copyright, but what is protected by copyright is the tangible work fixed in some form of medium (such as the saved .doc file on my computer). Obviously, I was the only person who actually worked out all the dialogue and action scenes and then wrote everything. Furthermore, because we were kids and did not have any way to turn our story into a real movie, we didn't take it that seriously and it was just a funny idea. However, there is one joke in the screenplay that my friend came up with that I have used word for word, yet the entire joke is only a single sentence containing 11 words. Now that I am finished with the story, I am actually quite surprised how entertaining the screenplay turned out to be, and I am thinking about copyrighting it and trying to hire an agent to shop it around. Therefore, my question is: Who owns the copyright? Am I sole owner, or does my friend have a legitimate argument that we have joint ownership of the copyright because he came up with a few scenes and scenarios in the movie 15 years ago?

• Answer:

  You have sole copyright. Your discussions with him were not part of the process of writing the story.