SFWA’s Contracts Committee has recently been seeing a proliferation of contracts from small magazines, and a very few established markets, that license all derivative rights in perpetuity. This is a red flag for a number of reasons, even if these rights are licensed non-exclusively.

SFWA’s Contracts Committee has recently been seeing a proliferation of contracts from small magazines, and a very few established markets, that license all derivative rights in perpetuity. This is a red flag for a number of reasons, even if these rights are licensed non-exclusively

by Kate Baker

“Why SFWA?” and “What can it do for me?” These two questions have stumped many a SFWA board member, volunteer, and employee throughout our existence. The typical answer had always been, “Bragging rights and oh, the emergency medical fund.” While those two things are definitely beneficial, I’m here to tell you that the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America is so much more.

Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden invites the public to provide input to the Library of Congress on expertise needed by the Register of Copyrights.

As part of the 2015 Nebula Awards weekend in Chicago, SFWA is seeking to join with the Illinois State Bar Association, as it did in 2005, to present a day-long joint Continuing Professional Education program for authors and lawyers.

Early in their careers, writers sometimes sign away valuable rights under less than favorable terms. This article discusses the important right of termination under US copyright law, which allows writers to reclaim such rights in their works and to try to make a better deal.

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware

You may have noticed that there were no posts last week. Apologies! I’ve got a humongous workload, and have had to cut myself off from the web almost entirely in order to deal with it. 

I thought I…

The issue of orphan works–out of print, still-in-copyright books, films, photographs, etc. whose rightsholders can’t be found–is one that has been much in the news lately.

One of the effects of the phenomenal growth of ebooks over the past few years has been to bring new value to the backlist–both for publishers who hold the contracts for backlist books, and authors who want the freedom to exploit a new range of rights.

Today, Smashwords founder Mark Coker guest blogs about “private label rights” services, which make it possible for anyone to “author” their own ebooks or to populate blogs by putting together chunks of content from the service’s database. The result: scads of badly-formatted, poor-quality ebooks and blogs, which are often used by SEO scammers to confuse Google Search results.