I am traveling at the moment so can’t do my weekly Publishing News, Book Marketing, and Writing Craft roundup. I started the blog to learn about publishing nearly eighteen years ago, and in the spirit of always learning I’ve written some articles on important topics for a writer to consider. These are my thoughts. It is not legal advice. Hopefully, I can shed some light on the subject of Copyright
It is Summer down under and while my writing brain takes a break from the current Work In Progress (WIP from the Fiction Overseer-er) I picked up a book on the history of copyright. I then proceeded to bore the family with what I thought were fascinating facts about the evolution of copyright.
For example, when the printing press was in its infancy, the printers wanted to make use of the technology, i.e. earn some money, so they printed pamphlets from anyone who wanted to get their ideas out to the people. They bought the right to copy the idea in printed form. This brought the printers into conflict with the authorities. They didn’t want just anybody being able to print information to the public. The public might get the wrong ideas. Printers were told they had to print the names of these idea rabble rousers so the authorities knew who to go after, otherwise they would be prosecuted. As this meant execution or hefty fines the printers quickly complied. From this practice of naming the author, the printer was absolved and notoriety was bestowed. Fame and fortune usually followed, sometimes just ahead of the police. Thomas Paine made a quick buck in three countries printing his revolutionary ideas before skipping town ahead of the executioner. (See Thomas Paine’s life for all the details.)
What does the term copyright mean for us now?
In its most basic form copyright is an intellectual property law that grants creators exclusive rights to their original works once they are recorded in a fixed form. The important parts of the previous sentence are original creator, exclusive right, once they are recorded and fixed form.
Fixed Form
Ownership of an ideas starts from the time it is written down. Print is usually the first fixed form. (If you want to be extra careful about when you created a character or novel idea, date your drafts.) Translations then opened up a pandoras box of problems as historically translators asserted copyright over the translated work. They sold the work as for their own profit cutting out the original creator. Eventually this was resolved by assigning only the copyright of the translation to the translator, and a license fee to translate was negotiated to benefit the original creator.
In the twentieth century along came the invention of audio and visual media. With the invention of mass media entertainment companies needed Intellectual Property. Contracts with the original creators began to get complicated. A contract written on a napkin after a boozy lunch wasn’t going to be sufficient anymore. In the twenty-first century computer code arrived and was considered as equal to books, art, and music. The code behind the software of the screen you are reading this on is copyrighted. As technology advances copyright laws get tested. It is a very complex collection of rights and laws.
Right now countries are grappling with works that are produced with Artificial Intelligence (or really complex computer code.) What laws should be in place to protect the creator of the code? In some early test cases the legal opinion is whoever generated the prompt to the AI is the copyright owner of what it produces. Artificial Intelligence is just a tool of production, similar to a pen. However, every country is approaching AI copyright works differently and what might be fine in your country won’t be somewhere else.
Exclusive Rights
As printers evolved into publishers and new ways of sharing the information became profitable, contracts assigning exclusive rights became more important.
Could the creator be tempted to assign exclusive rights to a printer publisher? What can the publisher expect to make from the exclusive right to the creator’s work. A good Return On Investment is at least 25% annually. The publishing model is a risky business. To make a profit a publisher needs a good performing piece of Intellectual Property.
Choosing a profitable work is difficult. Which work will generate profit? Nobody knows, for the public taste is fickle. For every ten works a publisher might acquire only one may take off and earn lots of money. And you don’t know which one of the ten it will be. If you have a hit, you need as many exclusive rights as possible to get as much money from the work as possible. Contracts between publisher and author hinge on how many exclusive rights the publisher can acquire from the author just in case this work is the one work that will generate a profit or be the next Harry Potter franchise. (Bloomsbury was looking pretty shaky when they acquired Harry Potter. They didn’t know until the third book sold out how big the phenomenon was likely to be and it saved their publishing company.)
The best description I have ever found on what exclusive rights are is Dean Wesley Smith’s book on copyright, The Magic Bakery. Here he breaks down Intellectual Property and copyright as slices of the one pie that is the exclusive work of the author creator in its first fixed form. Dean’s book is well worth reading and will grow your mind and give you a much better understanding of what the author creator actually owns and why Intellectual Property is so valuable that corporations spend billions of dollars just to get access to Intellectual Property assets.
To show you the potential value of Intellectual Property let’s look at just one right, the exclusive right to the audio production of a work, (a novel pie.) This can be sliced into narrator only, translation narrator only, multi voice narration, translated multi voice narration, audio drama, translation audio drama, soundtracks, abridged audio production, audio serialisation, and on into radio broadcast rights which opens up another big pie of rights to slice. And this is just for the first time these rights will be used. If the book has an updated second edition, it starts all over again.
Once upon a time
The words, ‘once it is recorded’, don’t look like they are important, but they are. From the time of creation, and then publication, copyright resides with the creator. Every country has a law that determines the length of time a copyright is valid. For us here in New Zealand our government says fifty years after the creator’s death. In the United States it is seventy years after the creator’s death. This means that creators need their heirs to know what they are doing with Intellectual Property. Your literary estate lives on after your death. However, there is a much more immediate clause in your contract about time, and that is the length of time the creator assigns an exclusive right.
Many author creators are so happy that a publisher wants to take their book that they quickly sign a contract and send it back without realising some of the implications and rights they have signed away. The words ‘in perpetuity’ mean forever. The phrase ‘for the entire life of the copyright,’ means, if the publisher is in the United States, seventy years after your death. The words world wide or universal rights means in any other language than the original language and the term universal rights covers any potential publication on another planet. You might think it’s funny but lawyers who write contracts have thought of it. Project out seventy years from when you turn one hundred and think about space exploration for a moment.
Time can be a good negotiating tool. For example, you can offer a publisher exclusive rights for a set period of time and then the rights revert back to you. Amazon has exclusive rights for seven years to your audio book if you publish through their audio book platform. If your book is going to be the next big franchise hit, and that increasingly depends on the marketing budget to get the word out, five to ten years is a good rule of thumb and one that agents are now writing into contracts. Reversion of rights is important and putting a time limit on exclusive rights gives the publisher a reasonable time frame to exploit the rights they have to the fullest. They may choose not to do anything or to let some rights slide as not important to be bothered with. Brandon Sanderson’s publisher let Brandon keep the rights to special editions on his first book. He was an unknown writer. Fantasy wasn’t that big of a deal. The tenth anniversary of the first books publication came around, and Brandon decided to have a kick starter campaign for a special edition. He wasn’t expecting forty million dollars to be pledged by the end of the campaign, and neither was his publisher who didn’t get a cent. You can just imagine how carefully Brandon’s publisher’s lawyers are going over the contracts to see what else they can make money on.
On January 1st every year a list is published of works that have come out of copyright. This can be a potential bonanza for publishers who can publish editions of famous books and not have to give literary estates anything. The character Miss Marple came out of copyright this year. Hopefully she won’t star in a slasher movie like Winnie the Pooh did the year following his copyright expiry date.
Copyright going forward.
The recent class action against Anthropic hinged on whether Anthropic paid for the books used to train their Claude Artificial Intelligence. If they had bought a copy of the book then, the judge said, it would be fair use to teach AI from it. After all students read and learn from textbooks. However, Anthropic programmers used a pirate site to get the books. Because they were using stolen property they needed to pay compensation to the copyright holders. With over 400,000 works identified as being copied, Anthropic settled out of court for one billion dollars, and the copyright holders are now working through their claim forms. The copyright holders of translated works will have to bring separate claims against Anthropic. The lawyers dealing with the claim are only dealing with works published in the United States and registered with the United States copyright authority for the purposes of legal protection. Unfortunately, a lot of authors found out their publisher had not registered their copyright claim (you can register anytime up to five years from first publication if you want to take legal action in the USA) and so they and their publisher are missing out on the settlement compensation.
There are more class actions going through the courts against other AI companies. Some AI companies have decided it is better to pay for a license to use a publisher’s backlist, trusting that the publisher will pass on compensation to copyright holders. Contract lawyers might have got there first though with the phrase ‘and other means of publication yet to be invented,’ a nice catch all phrase that has been a feature of publisher’s contracts for decades.
Copyright is an important subject that gets glossed over. If corporations can spend millions acquiring the rights to music, or film, or games, or characters, or any sort of Intellectual Property then the original creator needs to understand the value of their work and protect it. You might wake up tomorrow to discover that your work is a runaway success, and you aren’t entitled to a cent.
Your copyright is an asset judged by the courts. It is property and worth something. It can be used in a divorce settlement or a bankruptcy. If you understand the value of it first, you may save yourself an expensive mistake.
Hopefully, I have helped you understand a little more about the subject. I am always asking my young friends who want to be lawyers if they have thought about going into intellectual property law. It is the key to most entertainment law and where else can you get your name into the credits of movies, games, and acknowledgements.
If you are interested in further reading on the subject, check out Dean Wesley Smith’s book. The Magic Bakery
Who Owns This Sentence by Alexandre Montagu and David Bellos - print copies at your local bookshop or on Amazon
Copyright Maureen Crisp 2026
@craicer
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