Quote:
Originally Posted by Muss Muggins
So, if I’m following this, you’re explaining to an author, thru a third party, about the author’s copyright, and disputing the author’s interpretation? #AskingForAFriend
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As a follow up, and please remember that not everyone on here is a lawyer but everyone on here is a shooter, the copyright rules are fairly simple. So, unless Cajun Lawyer or any other lawyer on here wants to dispute my legal opinion, here goes:
Item 1. If you write something, the copyright is yours.
Item 2. If you are hired to write something the article is a "work for hire" and the copyright would ordinarily belong to the buyer, not the author.
Item 3. If you sell something that you write, ordinarily the copyright transfers to the buyer, unless you make other arrangements.
Item 4. If you sell something that you have written, like an article sold to a magazine, and the publisher agrees that the copyright did not transfer, then under normal circumstances a publisher should note that fact, as in "The copyrights to this article belong to the author".
Item 5. If you give an article to a magazine for publication you can certainly request that the publisher lets you retain the copyright. That occurs here and there in certain types of publications where readers "contribute" but do not sell their work. It happened just this past month in the Texas State Rifle Association's magazine and they made it perfectly clear that the author retained the copyright.
Item 6. If you sell an article and retain limited copyrights, like USA only, or similar, then the copyrights are owned by you for that purpose or "place" but the buyer owns the copyrights for every other "place".
Item 7. This is the only tricky item. If you sell an article to a magazine and it goes out of business and there is no successor entity and you did not retain a copyright interest I have to presume (I am not going to do the research for this but I know whom to ask so I'll get back to y'all on this) that all of the defunct magazine's articles are in the public domain. I don't think that reversionary copyright interests exist. But I shall find out. In the present case, if the author retained North American copyrights then he still owns that and the article is not in the public domain.
If you think that I was disputing Massad Ayoob's understanding of his copyright interests please tell me where I did that because I do not think that that happened.
