Agents. Producers. Contest readers. Coverage services. The work has to circulate, and every copy leaves your hands in a version you cannot later prove you had. Seal the draft first.
An inventor's exposure ends the day they file. A writer's never does. Every new agent, every new producer, every new contest is one more copy of your work in someone else's hands.
The nightmare is not a stolen script. It is a pass, then eighteen months of silence, then something adjacent in production. And a defence you cannot argue with.
Agents, producers, contests, coverage services, festival readers. Circulation is not a risk you can decide to avoid. It is the job. No submission, no career.
The defence you cannot disprove, and the reason theft claims almost never win. They read yours, passed, and arrived somewhere adjacent a year later. You have nothing to hold up.
You register the draft you finished in March. By June it is a different, better script, and it is the one going out. The version actually circulating is almost never the version on file.
Google Docs. Final Draft. A folder of versions. Every file can be altered, every timestamp can be argued with, and all of it was under your own control. As evidence, it carries close to nothing.
An unpublished manuscript must stay unpublished. What goes into Bitcoin is unreadable ciphertext. What is public is only this: a specific, unaltered document existed on a specific date.
Paste the screenplay, the manuscript, the treatment. It is encrypted before it leaves your browser, written into Bitcoin, and opened only with a phrase we never receive. The work stays unpublished.
One line, public. Title and logline, fixed to a date, without giving the story away.
Long, but public. For work you intend to publish anyway and simply want fixed to a date.
A whole novel is the one thing that does not fit in a single record. Everything a writer actually sends out fits. The synopsis, the treatment, the pilot, the feature. You always see the exact price before you pay.
You already have two options, and both are good. Neither does what this does, and this does not do what they do. Here is the honest picture, including where we lose.
Register the work. Then seal the version you are about to send.
Except you are not. Here is exactly why that is safe, and how you check it for yourself rather than take our word for it.
The text is encrypted on your own machine. What reaches Bitcoin is ciphertext. There is no readable copy of your script on our servers to leak, subpoena, or sell.
The reader is open source. Your phrase and the transaction id recover the draft on your own machine. If PermaWord closes tomorrow, nothing is lost and nothing is destroyed.
Anyone can confirm that a sealed record existed in a given block on a given date. Nobody can read a syllable of what is inside it. That asymmetry is the whole product.
PermaWord is supplementary evidence. It is not a copyright registration and it does not replace one. Copyright attaches the moment you write. Registration adds real legal benefits, including a public record and, in qualifying cases, statutory damages and attorney's fees. This is independent evidence of what existed at a particular time, and nothing more. Seal the draft, then register the work.
Paste the draft. Choose a phrase only you know. Pay once by card. The version you sent is fixed to a date in Bitcoin, and unreadable to everyone, including us.