The last few months have been keeping me quite busy. There have been a few major developments so I thought I would share them all in one gigantor post.

First off, I got a new business partner named Stacy Porter and together we launched Write Vault.

Now before you go rolling your eyes (another registration service? aren’t there enough?), I think Write Vault was worth doing and we had myriad reasons for doing it. When we set out to create WV, it was first to fill the void created by the loss of WriteSafe.com.

As we dug deeper we also found that the existing services just didn’t stack up for our tastes. For one thing, both Stacy and I are writers. We’re both filmmakers as well, and we wanted to make sure that this was something that was not formed and controlled by a union that didn’t give you access to your own work, and was also transparent in its registration. Hence why you can verify a registration with WV, but not with anyone else. Think about that for a moment: you’re a producer and someone gives you a script. It says it’s WGA (or ProtectRite) registered with a number/letter combination on it. Right now, you simply have to take them at their word that it’s protected. I don’t think this kind of security through obscurity works when the entire process is predicated on one bit of obscurity.

The other big thing for us was price. We know many writers and artists don’t have a lot of money. That’s why we set each registration at $10 for 10 years. $1 per year. It doesn’t get much easier (or less expensive) than that. And if you want more pretty tables of figures, we have that too.

The one feature about Write Vault that I wanted to make sure was available at launch come hell or high water was the ability to register more than just written works. We wanted to make sure we more closely paralleled copyright in terms of what can be registered.

And shortly after we launched WV I was asked by the super awesome Deane Ogden about participating in a roundtable podcast called ART\Work. I’m not going to link to the official site just yet because as of this writing it’s under construction but will be going up soon.

We will be recording our first podcast in about a week and putting it up shortly thereafter in July. I’ll post something here and everywhere else I’m at as soon as it goes live. I hope you will tune in.