Nearby Café Home > Literature & Writing > WordWork



Intellectual Property

Why Fight to Retain Your Rights?
by A. D. Coleman

You have two good reasons for fighting always to retain your copyright and all subsidiary rights to your work.

First comes the issue of principle. Whenever you actualize your thought by writing it down in a transmissible form -- ink on paper, ones and zeros in a digital text file -- the U.S. copyright law immediately declares it yours and begins to protect it. At that moment you are an independent maker of intellectual property; all the fruits of that labor belong to you, and you can utilize and dispose of them as you choose.

The copyright law acknowledges you as the author of anything you write down in such a permanent form, and at that moment of creation grants you the copyright thereto and full control over any specific usages thereof, which are called "subsidiary rights." The right to publish something in a printed periodical is one example of a subsidiary right; the right to publish it online at a website is another; the right to translate it into another language and publish a sound recording of it is another.

You can license usages to your material, in which case you retain ownership, or you can sell any or all of those rights, transferring legal ownership of them, in which case you will no longer control them. Forinstance, you could exercise the subsidiary right of online publication by posting a given essay at your own website; you could license a one-year exclusive online usage to a webzine, after which online rights would revert to you; or you could sell all online rights to an internet content aggregator such as Lexis-Nexis.

Once you sign away in perpetuity any specific right, or put your name to an all-rights contract, you have no further control over that particular usage or the work as a whole, and reap no further benefits from it, even if you "retain copyright" (a meaningless concept if you relinquish all the subsidiary rights that copyright includes). You become with that act a freelance pieceworker, the writerly equivalent of the people who used to make shirt collars at home.
Endorse a work-made-for-hire (WMFH) contract and it's even worse: You actually cease to exist as the author of that work. The new owner becomes its legal author, free to keep your name on it or remove it and substitute someone else's, free to revise it and use your name to sell the altered results. In both cases, the new holder of the subsidiary rights and (in many cases) the copyright can exploit the work in any way at all, owing you nothing more -- or can leave it to molder in a drawer. You have absolutely no say in those matters.

Nor can you thereafter revise that essay slightly and send out a rewritten version; that's a widespread and dangerous myth. Such retooling qualifies as de facto copyright violation and, bizarrely, in the case of WMFH contracts, plagiarism to boot. (This is perhaps the only situation in which you can legally be charged with plagiarizing something you yourself created.)
One dollar ($1) per word, the NWU's recommended minimum for first publication rights, was considered good money in the industry . . . back in 1965; the equivalent today would be $4-5 per word. Given that fact, we can assume safely that no publisher or other client will pay you appropriately and sufficiently even for licensed usages of your intellectual property; at best the compensation you will receive for your work will prove a pittance. Since they're offering bargain-basement rates, what could possibly entitle them to own your work outright, to profit from it as they see fit henceforth, without sharing the benefits with you? What could give them, conversely, the right to let that piece languish in a drawer and lead no further useful and financially productive life in the world?

Opposing that inappropriate sense of entitlement on the part of publishers and other clients, with its implicit disdain of and hostility to the survival of the maker of intellectual property, constitutes the principle. As Abraham Lincoln wrote, "To secure to each laborer the whole product of his labor, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government." The U.S. Copyright Law achieves that for us; the more fool they who throw that fundamental protection away, or sell this birthright for a mess of pottage.

But the union doesn't advocate holding on to your copyright and subsidiary rights merely on principle. We recommend this because those rights have cash value; they're worth money. (That's why publishers want to bully you into surrendering them.) Intellectual property is property. It forms part of your personal wealth. It becomes part of your estate when you die. And, so long as you and your heirs own it, until it enters the public domain you and they can exploit it profitably.

What can you do with your finished and published writings to make more money with them? A short list:

  • License additional uses of them as written, to other relevant publications — print, online, intranet, CD-ROM, etc.
  • Explore potential markets in other demographic or geographic territories — including other languages.
  • Merge two or more of them — or sections from any number of them — into a longer "new" piece that can have a publishing life of its own.
  • Construct a book on that subject incorporating them as chapters or sections thereof.
  • Use them as the basis for a series of lectures.
  • Turn them into the lesson plans, curriculum, readings, and/or take-away handouts for a workshop or seminar you'll offer.
  • Convert them into the voiceover for a video or film.
  • Produce a CD-ROM of yourself (or someone else) reading them out loud, for people to listen to while driving, exercising, etc., for sale at your lectures and seminars.
  • Set up your own website and sell pdf downloads of the essays.
  • Set up a free-access website and use them as rich content to draw visitors and potential clients to your work.
  • Donate usages of them to deserving non-profit publications and organizations.

Nothing except your imagination and energy limits the list of possibilities. We can refer to this range of activity as subsidiary-rights licensing, or self-syndication; but perhaps it's more provocative to think of it as multipurposing your work, or developing a synergistic relationship to it. Any professional-quality piece of writing can serve numerous purposes — and those varied functions can feed each other.

Few of your writings will ever reach their maximum audience. Only a small percentage of the readers who might find them useful and/or enjoyable will ever come across them. There's no more reason to assume that a given piece of writing should get published only once than to assume a song should get sung only once and then retired from performance. Syndication services operate on that very premise. Your writing may be too specialized to attract the interest of such an enterprise, but you can replicate the model in a home-office microversion.

Speaking from personal experience, I can testify that it's possible to license usage of a single essays more than a dozen times, receiving additional payments or other benefits each time. It's possible to open new markets for your work, in other parts of the country and elsewhere in the world, even in other languages. It's possible to revise and republish -- with only minor changes -- essays that are two decades old. It's possible to build publishable books out of previously published essays without doing any rewriting at all. It's possible to construct an exciting website than can serve you as a powerful professional tool, using your own published work.

If you begin to conceptualize your writing output as inventory, and to consider its potential for multipurposing, you will come to understand it as your cash cow, a source of continuous and dependable revenue, requiring only a minimal amount of regular care and feeding. Maintaining your ownership of it is the first and most important step toward ensuring your financial stability and independence as a writer — which in turn will embolden you in fending off the predators with their rights-grabbing contracts.

back to top

This essay first appeared in American Writer, Vol. 22, no. 1 (Fall 2005), pp. 11, 22. This is the journal of record of the National Writers Union.

Copyright © 2005 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved. For reprint permissions contact Image/World Syndication Services, POB 040078, Staten Island, NY 10304-0002 USA;T/F (718) 447-3091, imageworld@nearbycafe.com.