Copyrights - Starting a new cartoon series

[gmble922]

Hello Guys
A few years ago I had the idea and dream of creating my own animated cartoon and establishing a channel on YouTube. The idea of combining something creative with building something, in this case a YouTube channel, excited me a lot. This year I started with Moho and quickly achieved success, so that I am currently working on several episodes. The characters have their own recognition value.
As time goes by, the whole project gets more and more quality and as I have also invested in hardware and software, I am increasingly concerned about copy protection and in general how I can protect my works from being copied. I know it probably sounds pretentious, but the thought of someone else, maybe a bigger studio, picking up the idea and making it big at a greater speed than me worries me. On the other hand, of course I want to publish and maybe eventually build a brand and sell some merchandise here and there. Again, I don't want to sound pretentious, but I've rarely had anything in my life that I've been so passionate about.

Can you please give me some food for thought on how to proceed here? I know that copy protection is automatic when the work is created. But in practice, you have to be able to prove it. Do you think it would be a good idea to first produce as many episodes as possible without publishing them in order to then have as much material as possible for YouTube, in order to quickly position oneself widely with the idea, with the characters and the way these characters behave? Do you think it would make sense to register a trademark in the future?

Thank you very much for your help. I am glad that this community exists

[hayasidist]

... Do you think it would be a good idea to first produce as many episodes as possible without publishing them in order to then have as much material as possible for YouTube, in order to quickly position oneself widely with the idea, with the characters and the way these characters behave? ...

my own view on this is as with anything that is done where there is an expectation that there will be "the next instalment":

How often do you want to publish? How long does it takes to produce one instalment?

If the planned publication frequency is longer than the production time (e.g. you want to issue an episode once a week and it takes a day or so to produce one [ha ha!]) then no need to create loads up front -- have enough "in the bag" so you can take time off and still hit your publication frequency. Pull the plug after a steady decline from a peak (or if a desired peak is never achieved) -- if you're not familiar with product life cycle s-curves, take a look at how that explains "decline"...)

But vice-versa (e.g. you want to issue an episode once a week and it takes a year or so to produce one) then you'd better get the whole first series finished before publishing the first episode. And then decide whether there'll be a second series...

You could also consider publishing the outlines / concept drawings as a "hardcopy" book (e.g. Amazon Kindle Direct) in advance of the animation, which will support your assertion that you own the IP.

[alanthebox]

I wonder if it would be safer to produce an entire season's worth of content and then release it on a paid streaming service (like Amazon) and release teasers on YouTube? A forum member recently had a webinar that I believe touched on this?

https://youtu.be/R3PRXaw65cQ

Kilian is active on the forum, so, perhaps they will chime in or you could reach out via PM (username: arglborps)?

YouTube, in general, can be a little dodgy when it comes to copyright. I've had my own work claimed, even though it was completely original (including music and sfx). It took over a month to resolve and was quite frustrating and, to a degree, insulting. I've seen numerous reports of full-time content creators whose entire livelihoods have been threatened by YouTube's broken copyright system. I suppose for a newly created series, access to such a large audience can be worth the risk, though.