Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ukma!uflorida!novavax!proxftl!twwells!bill
From: bill@twwells.uucp (T. William Wells)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: Re: Jon Carroll's column in SF Chronicle
Summary: legal ignorance is....ignorance
Message-ID: <186@twwells.uucp>
Date: 19 Nov 88 13:53:41 GMT
References: <7673@well.UUCP> <1221@fig.bbn.com>
Reply-To: bill@twwells.UUCP (T. William Wells)
Organization: None, Ft. Lauderdale
Lines: 45

In article <1221@fig.bbn.com> rsalz@bbn.com (Rich Salz) writes:
:
:  The following column by Jon Carroll was published in the SF Chronicle
:  on Wednesday, 11/9/1988.  It is included here with Jon's permission.
:  He would be interested in any feedback from the net.  His email
:  address is    {pacbell,ucbvax,hplabs,apple}!well!jrc
:  (It was posted before, but a cancellation went out before there was
:  much discussion.  I do not have 'hard copy' in front of me to check
:  spelling, etc. with.)
:
: Unfortunately, Jon's permission isn't good enough; you need the permission
: of the SF Chronicle.  The Chronicle paid Jon to write the article, and
: they own the copyright on it.

Sorry, but it may or may not be true that the permission of the
publisher is required to reprint it.

See, when you have someone publish a work of yours, you give him
certain rights to your work.  The absolute minimum you might grant the
publisher is the right to print your work *once*, you retaining all
rights thereafter. You might also transfer all rights to the
publisher, leaving yourself with no rights to the work.  These are
two extremes; the usual contract (for magazines, I don't know about
newspapers) gives the publisher the right to publish the work once
and in certain derivative works, like "best of..." books; however,
the author retains the write to publish the work, once the magazine
has printed it.

Since these rights may range from one printing only to complete
transfer of ownership, unless you happen to know the details of the
contract, you can't say anything at all about whether the publisher's
approval is required.

: The article should, again, be cancelled.  Posting it to the net is
: still a violation of US copyright law.
:       /rich $alz

If the contract between the publisher and the author was of the usual
type, then he did have the right to give permission for it to be
reprinted. We are not in any position to judge, so let's not go
having cancellation wars, please?

---
Bill
{uunet|novavax}!proxftl!twwells!bill