Who Owns Your Work?

This is a question that has plagued writers and other creative professionals for generations. If you've invested the time, money, and energy to hone your artistic skills, shouldn't you be fairly compensated for them, just as someone who's honed their skills as a physician, accountant, or attorney is compensated for theirs? Of course you should. But when you're selling an intangible product, the quality of the work becomes a factor in determining value, and how to measure that quality has largely been left up to whoever's paying for it.

Increasingly in recent years, writers who focus on magazine articles have been faced with contracts from major publishers demanding "all rights" to an article, or they won't do business with you. These include reprints, electronic versions, and any other way they want to use your work, effectively prohibiting you from selling the same article to other publications without major revisions.

Since no magazine publisher pays well enough to reimburse you for the many hours required to research and write a quality story, this was a major impediment to earning a living writing for magazines. The only way a writer could hope to earn a living writing articles was to resell the same article to multiple publications. But with these all-rights-or-nothing contracts, you couldn't even republish your own articles in book form without permission from the publisher that owned all rights to them! For magazines to use their muscle to bully writers in this way is, from the writer's point of view, wrong.

From the publisher's point of view, however, it was seen as a way to protect an asset for which they had paid. With e-publishing a necessity in today's online world and e-articles easy to copy and paste into other people's sites, publishers are increasingly looking for ways to protect their content from piracy. Writers who self-publish are facing the same thing. And since publishers typically have armies of lawyers to sue people, they've taken their fight into the courts. This has brought up the issue of "fair use" of published material, refining its interpretation under the law...or even provoking lawmakers in D.C. to propose new rules governing piracy -- you may have heard a lot recently about the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, currently under consideration.

One ongoing lawsuit was filed by publisher Righthaven against the Center for Intercultural Organizing, which republished an article from Righthaven's Las Vegas Review-Journal in its entirety, without obtaining permission or paying a royalty. A local judge found in favor of the CIO, and the case is currently being appealed to a higher court. Internet giants are weighing in on the case, as well as on SOPA, as these could have a drastic effect on their business. You can read about the Righthaven case here.

So what does constitute "fair use"? If you're a blogger, this could have an impact on you. Just how much of someone else's article can you republish in your blog without getting sued? Suppose someone else republishes one of your articles completely without giving you credit or paying you a royalty; should you sue them?

Interestingly, Google also comes into play in the answer to this. With the release of Google's Panda algorithms in 2011, duplicate content on a website is frowned upon. Google wants each site to offer something fresh, new, and unique. So if you blog, you may refer to another article you've read, as I did above. You may link to it, so people can read that article in its entirety. But reproducing it verbatim on your blog will actually hurt you in search results. Google has now become the Karma of the Internet.

If you want to read more about how the law views this topic, here's a link to the U.S. Copyright Office's page on fair use. Wikipedia also has a fair use entry, as well as one on SOPA, and there are numerous articles on fair use from various universities and legal organizations. Just do a search (using whichever search engine you prefer) on the terms "fair use" and "stop online piracy act" to find them. The conclusion? Definition of the term "fair use" is still pretty much up in the air. And, depending on your viewpoint, that could be good or bad for writers.