Help with copyright question

It is only amatuers and academics who transfer copyright for magazine or journal articles to publishers. Anyone with an agent or who writes regularly for magazines is more likely to keep the copyright and to simply assign something like "First North American Serial Rights" (usually to be published within some specified time limit). The idea that the publisher should be assigned the copyright to the material and then give an author back some unspecified rights is vague at best and complicates greatly anything that the author wishes to do with the material later.

I believe this is the origin of several recent cases (which I have only read about in the papers) where authors are suing magazines and newspapers for putting the full text of the publications (and thus the authors articles) online, which would clearly be forbidden under a grant of the kind mentioned above. It has always seemed unlikely to me that syndicated columns can be "republished" in this way.

Does anyone know anything about these cases?

Richard Weyhrauch
rww[_at_]ibuki.com Received on Thu Jan 06 1994 - 19:08:51 GMT