Neill Walker wrote:
By sending it to them, without guarantee of payment, you agree to give
them distribution rights and waive your copyright... But they have to
send you notice of this in advance. If they've made a written agreement
to pay you IF the fic is used, then you waive your copyright at the time
of payment. This company informally stated that $100 or so would be
paid if the fic was published, so they aren't REQUIRED to pay you unless
you get a legal document. If they post it at a later date, you're still
entitled to the money. Once you accept payment, it's theirs.
----------
This outfit is starting to sound like really bad news.
Paying people for fanfics is gonna land them in one BIG heap o' trouble.
Won't do much for the fanfic authors neither.
As far as the above statement is concerned, though, it is not necessarily
correct. If a magazine buys a story, they are generally not buying the
story itself, but the right to publish it. If you sell them all the rights
to your story, you are doing a dumb thing. The contract should stipulate
something along the lines of "first North American serial rights" - which
means they are buying the right to be the first ones to publish the story
in North America (which generally includes Canada and Mexico - foreign
rights are negotiated separately.)
Selling the magazine these rights does NOT waive your copyright - not
unless you SELL them the copyright, which as previously stated, would be a
silly thing to do. (Not that a lot of people haven't done it)
Now where things can get hairy is when they buy the rights to a story and
DO NOT publish it. If they buy first rights and then sit on the story, the
writer, even though the story is still his, is enjoined (prohibited) from
selling the story to another publisher unless he can secure a release of
rights from the first publisher.
An example of this is the infamous last "Dangerous Visions" anthology...
Harlan Ellison bought the rights to a lot of stories for this book, and has
been sitting on them for over 20 years now. This has made a few authors
*very* angry, but, legally, they cannot resell their stories until Harlan
publishes the damned anthology, or until he releases the rights.
Zen-
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[[ James Bateman (Otaku@nashville.com) ]]
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