A single book can be sold in all sorts of different formats: the print format encompasses both hard cover and paperback, each of which can be sold separately (although this is becoming increasingly uncommon now); then there’s large print, the electronic version, serialisation rights for newspapers and magazines, and of course, audio rights. On top…
Category Archives: copyright
Stealing Is Not Acceptable No Matter What You Call It
On Friday, while I was in the middle of the whirl of posts that so many of you lovely people wrote about copyright, two things jumped up and waved at me. First I received a Google alert which showed that someone had copied seven posts from my blog and pasted them into his without permission…
Lost Book Sales
Here’s an interesting new blog: it asks readers to send in their stories of the books they tried to buy but couldn’t, and to explain why. It’s a sobering read, and for every lost sale which is reported to the site there must be many, many more out there in the wild. I’m not entirely…
Writers’ Rights: Right?
As we’ve learned lately some people wrongly assume that work which is available to the public, particularly on the internet, is “in the public domain” and therefore available to be reproduced any way anyone likes. This is not true: there are very particular laws regarding copyright, which we are all meant to follow; and it’s…
Another Statement From Judith Griggs At Cooks Source
Judith Griggs at Cooks Source magazine has just issued another statement. Here it is in its entirety, in case it disappears like the last one just did. / Its sad really. The problem is that I have been so overworked and stretched that when this woman — Monica — contacted me, I was on deadline…
Cooks Source Issues A Statement
I had a brief look at the Cooks Source website this morning and it was still there in a somewhat truncated version: the home-page was pretty much unchanged, but most of the other links had gone. I just took another look, and all it contains now is a statement in which it claims Cooks Source…
Let’s Learn About Copyright: Get Blogging!
Some of you might have noticed (ha!) that last week I blogged about the Cooks Source copyright infringement story and suddenly, the number of visitors to this site has soared. I usually get between 300 and 800 hits on any single day; and until last week, my highest-ever number of hits was around 1,200 when…
Copyright Infringement And A Medieval Apple Pie
Tuesday, November 9 This affair has attracted a lot of ugliness which I find very disturbing. I know it’s an emotive issue; I agree that Griggs was wrong in using other people’s work without permission, and I don’t think she’s handled things well at all: but I don’t think she deserves the insulting and abusive…
Plagiarism: The Whole Story
If you’ve been following my anti-plagiarism blog posts, you might be interested to know that Vanessa Gebbie has now blogged about the whole sorry mess in detail, giving names of all the writers, stories and publications involved. It’s a sordid story, but I’m glad it’s all out in the open now. Here’s the link. To…
Anti-Plagiarism Day: An Update
Remember how so many of us joined forces to fight plagiarism? I’ve been told that the “writer” who sparked off all that outrage has once again won a prize for a story which seems to owe far too much to someone else’s work. And this time, the writer who wrote the original piece might well…
Anti-Plagiarism Day!
Before I start, I have to point out that I don’t want to scare anyone here. Despite the fears of many novice writers, plagiarism doesn’t happen often in the professional arena. Very few jobbing writers would ever even consider it as an option, and the odds in favour of a publisher or agent stealing the…
Anti-Plagiarism Day: Friday 17 July
Just a little reminder to you all that on Friday I’ll be blogging about plagiarism, and hope that some of you will write about it on your own blogs. If you’ve already written on the subject send me links (by email or in the comments to my plagiarism posts) and I’ll edit them into my…
Anti-Plagiarism Day: Friday 17 July
A few weeks ago I watched a nasty case of plagiarism unfold which involved some writers I’ve had close dealings with over the last few months. One trusted, talented member of an online writing workshopping group went much too far when looking to his colleagues’ writing for inspiration, and ended up in deep and particularly…
Message-Board Plagiarism (Part II)
This piece is one of a small group of my published posts which recently decided to hide themselves from view and move to my drafts folder. I am inept, and don’t know why that happened, but I’m posting them all again and hope that this time they stay where they’re put. Apologies for any confusion….
Assigning Copyright
Some publishers demand that their writers sign over their full copyright as part of a publishing deal: this is rarely a good thing for the writer, and but can be very lucrative for the publisher. All sorts of different rights coexist in a single piece of work, and each can be sold: for example, rights…
Copyright vs. Publishing Rights
Copyright and publishing (or reproduction) rights are two different things. Copyright is a legal term. In the UK and the USA at least, all writers automatically own full copyright in their work as soon as they create it, and laws exist to protect them. Publishing rights are what writers sell, assign, license or otherwise hand…
Who Owns the Copyright?
Ownership of printed material does not constitute ownership of the copyright in the words that are printed on it. So, while you might own a bundle of letters which your first boyfriend sent you, you don’t own the copyright to what he wrote in them—that remains with him. Just as copyright in books remains with…
Quoting And Copyright Law
In its Quick Guide to Permissions, The Society of Authors states that “you need permission to quote from works that are in copyright”. In order to establish if a piece of writing is in copyright, you need to know two things: the country in which the work was published, and how copyright law works in…
Copyright vs. Copywrite
Copyright refers to the rights that automatically exist in a piece of work as soon as that work is created. The owners of those rights can transfer, assign, license, sell or otherwise hand over those rights in full or in part to second parties in the form of publishing rights, performance rights or reproduction rights,…