Copyright: at the moment we are stuck with what the Library of Congress says
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| Title: | "Copyright: at the moment we are stuck with what the Library of Congress says" (the title used here on Fanlore) |
| Creator: | Jean Lorrah |
| Date(s): | September 1978 |
| Medium: | |
| Fandom: | a focus on Star Trek: TOS |
| Topic: | |
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| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Copyright: at the moment we are stuck with what the Library of Congress says is a 1978 essay by Jean Lorrah.
It was printed in Right of Statement #2 as part of a three-essay series called "For Your Information."
- How about a discussion of one of everybody's favorite topics: money? by Jean Lorrah
- Copyright: at the moment we are stuck with what the Library of Congress says by Jean Lorrah
- Let's calculate the 'score' for Bantam and see if they can be said to have 'won' the Fizzbin game so far. by Jean Stevenson
For context, see Timeline of Fanwork Copyright and Legality Meta.
Previous Statement
This essay was in response to Lorrah's comments in the previous issue of Right of Statement:
Important copyright law news for all zine editors. Unless you get a transfer of copyright from an author or artist, you MUST place a copyright notice his name on his piece. See the way it's done in NTM Collected. Then you register the zine, and contributors heed not individually register their work to protect it. Your own notice for the whole zine remains the same, e.g. c 1978 by ISIS PRESS, but the new law considers that to protect each to protect each contributor's claim to his own work there is no need to reassign the rights to the authors; they never lost them unless they assigned them to you.
Some Topics Discussed
- fanfiction, fan art and copyright
- when people figure out there is money to be made from fanworks, there will be more pirates and others stealing their stuff
From the Essay
This letter [is an] open apology from me to all fan zine editors and contributors. The information I gave in ROS #1 and in A PIECE OF THE ACTION was false! I was not lying; I was following the interpretation of the new law by a copyright lawyer hired by the Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers to explain the law to its members. According to the Library of Congress, his instructions were totally wrong.
The information I am about to give comes from the Library of Congress. It is in direct contradiction to the intent of the new law,which was., supposed to protect the contributor to a compilation from having his rights taken and from having to pay $10.00 for each and every poem, story, article, etc. he might publish in order to have it protected under the law. At the moment, the Library of Congress is the only interpreter with any clout. There may be lawsuits in the future that will prove their interpretation wrong and the interpretation copyright lawyers have been giving to writers correct, but at the moment we are stuck with what the Library of Congress says.
I talked on the phone for almost an hour one day with Jodi Rush Sigmon from the Examining Division of the Copyright Office, trying to find out if there is any way to keep the Library of Congress from getting, say, $240.00 for registrations on a zine that has 23 contributors and an editor. The solution is this: each contributor must make a written • transfer of copyright to the editor.
Obviously, many authors will not like this -- it depends on how much the author trusts the editor. The editor then registers the zine with herself as"author", listing as her part of it,"entire work." She does not fill in any other authors' names on the copyright form, or it will be bounced. If one or two authors have refused to give transfers of copyright, the editor lists herself as "author", and under her contribution puts "compilation and entire work except X and Y, X and Y, of course, behind the titles of the stories and articles to which she has not been given copyright.
In this case it is important to put in "compilation" to protect her right to reprint exactly as the zine stands, including the material to which she does not hold copyright. Again, she does not list anywhere else on her registration form the names or contributions of those authors who did not give her transfers of copyright, or the form will be bounced.
[much, much detail snipped]
I humbly apologize to everyone who has been inconvenienced by attempting to use the method I originally advocated. All I can say is, when the copyright lawyers give you wrong advice, who are you going to listen to? And keep your eyes and ears open in the future — there will undoubtedly be test cases about this new law, because the kind of incredible gyrations I have just described are precisely what it was supposed to prevent.
And by the way, "Why bother?" is precisely the wrong attitude. Even though registration is complex, do it. We have already heard of one fan artist's work being ripped off, mass-produced, and sold commercially. The same thing could happen to anyone, especially if the new movie brings a great binge of STAR TREK commercialism.
Paramount is not going to do anything so crass or stupid as stealing fan work -- but for every trend there are money-grabbing hangers-on. Why leave yourself without legal recourse if you should happen to be the victim of such pirates? Or, even worse, by putting no copyright notice or an improper notice (the one on ROS #1 is improper because the circle ((not parentheses)) is not drawn around the "c"), why invite the unscrupulous to help themselves?
A proper notice consists of the word cord "Copyright" and/or the symbol "©"followed by the holder's name and the year. That's all there is
to it — so simple hundreds of people keep getting it wrong! No, you haven't blown it if you've inserted the word "by", but you have if the symbol is incomplete, if you've omitted the year or the name of the holder, or if you have not put the name of a person or a press but something like "the authors" or "the editors".
Well, there I go again — another whole heap of technical data. But then, didn't I hear somewhere that you're sick of discussions of the Kirk/Spock relationship?
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