Copyrighted ideas????

to be honest, I've seen people post outlines of their stories on here an I've been able to pick out, "oh well, my story uses that and has a character with the same name. That's weird, I never posted my story... dang we must be on the same wavelength."

^being completely original ideas that is.

I don't worry about it too much though, because although of seen similar things, mine is still different.

The idea of copyright is to protect the ideas of the author. Characters, ideas (which would be the whole story actually) should be protected under copyright.

Themes on the other hand, are more general, and authors usually re-create themes to fit into their books. So unless it's an extremely drawn out and detailed theme (I don't know why it would be however) then it probably wont be under copyright.

Copyright doesn't cover ideas or themes, but that's a little easier to say than to explain.

The ideas in a book, such as the plot and themes, are not copyrighted. But, the way those ideas are arranged, along with all the words that go to explain how those ideas mesh, is copyrighted.

Things such as characters, fictional locations, and any other things that are completely from the writer's head are copyrighted. This means you can't go off and write stories about other authors' characters without permission, since the author owns the copyright to those characters.

The main focus of what makes something copyrighted is that it needs to be recorded in some sort of fixed medium (if you write it on paper or on your computer or anything else, that counts), and ideas, themes and the like can't be put into a fixed medium.

Well it protects your piece of work including everything. Of course not your character's names and place. Unless your character name is made up of your own. If one of your character is named John Walker, it won't protected because it is a very common name. But it it's something like: Opatqel then it is protected cause you made it up. Same with locations: New York (no protected), Rueljk (protected). The themes not really since all the books usually have similar themes.

Go here to read more:

http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.pdf

Thsi woudl go better in a legal section