Forum: Author Hangout

Possibly because of the expense? Lots of countries, postage alone could be significant. If you need a lawyer or a translator or both the costs mount up.

That wouldn't account for why only filed copyrights ($35 per pop) could sue.

@Ernest
Thanks. It sounds like they (the person making the claim) was referring to Statutory damages (i.e. damages above what they technically 'stole in sales').

A copyright isn't that expensive, but at $35 x 15 books to date, that comes out to $525, about what I paid for my ISBNs, or what I pay in stock art per year.

Something to think about, and as usual, it takes an Aussie to explain American law to an American. :)

Something to think about, and as usual, it takes an Aussie to explain American law to an American. :)

CW,

for more than thirties years a large component of my work has involved reading and interpreting legislation to apply it to what I'm doing, often in a regulation enforcement situation. SO I'm kind of used to working out the meanings of them. But I don't always get all the fine detail right.

Actual damages can be really hard to prove and may well be zero for something you made available on line for free.

Not only that, but you're limited to sales lost to the copyright theft. If someone steals your book and publishes it on Amazon for $.99, or offers it on their website for free, not only is it difficult to get their sales figures, but your actual loss is MUCH greater than their 'give away' commission. For every book they give away, you're losing the full retail, not to mention the loss of your professional reputation as a legitimate author.

I wonder if you can register right before filing suit. Maybe it's the first step in the suing process.

You can, but they also stipulate, you must file the copyright before any competing claims are filed against it. Thus, waiting until someone else publishes your book before you file is an invalid procedure. To protect yourself, you need to file before anyone violates your rights.

how many authors here would routines file the $35 fee for each of their stories in order to protect their works?

Even if I was a US author, I wouldn't bother, unless I felt the story was going to be a fair sized hit bringing in several hundred sales or more in the first year. Luckily for me, I'm under Aussie law and I don't have to go through such a registration system, because the accords provide me with the same legal coverage in the US as I have in Australia - thus I can sue for damages in the USA in the exact same way as I do in Australia.

The fewer sales you have the more likely statutory damages are to greatly exceed actual damages.

But having low sales will also reduce what the judge will award, too. You also have to take into account the costs involved in taking it to court as it's a civil case.

I have the same access to damages in the USA as I do in Australia, regardless of where the breach occurs in the USA, because the works are covered under Australian copyright law - thus the level of proof stays the same. As best as I can tell from what I've read on the US law I need to be a legal entity within the US at the time the copyright is created to get coverage under the US law. This can be done by either writing the work while in the USA, or by contracting with a US based person or company to handle the work for me in the USA, and then they register it with the US Copyright Office because a new copyright-able version is created at the time of the contract. That's why there are some Sherlock Holmes stories still under copyright in the US while they're in the public domain in the rest of the world.

In short, if I contract with Blogs Publishing House USA to distribute the work they register it with the Copyright Office and it's covered by US copyright law. However, is all I do is commission Blogs Publishing House USA to print the books and ship them, they are not covered by US copyright law, but still covered by Australian copyright law since I'm paying a printer to print and issue an Aust copyrighted work - the printer's location is irrelevant.

One advantage under Aussie law is:

A copyright notice (©) is not required on a work to gain copyright, but only the copyright owner is entitled to place a notice. It is useful in publishing the date of first publication and the owner. Where a copyright notice is used, the onus in infringement proceedings is on the defendant to show that copyright does not subsist or is not owned by the person stated in the notice.

One advantage under Aussie law is:

A copyright notice (©) is not required on a work to gain copyright, but only the copyright owner is entitled to place a notice.

The same is true in the U.S. Some time ago, I worried whether I could legally use the copyright symbol without registering the work, but that's not the case.

The first thing you will have to prove in court is that you are the owner of the copyright.

That will depend on the actual laws involved, in some cases the plaintiff doesn't have to prove they own the copyright, the defendant has to prove they do. But that's where publication records come into play. It can get tricky if you publish under a pen-name.

bearing a postmark which establishes a hard date.

I read many times that all you have to do is mail the manuscript to yourself and keep it unopened. The date of the postmark would be the proof.

Then I was told that will not hold up in court.

I was told if you show earlier drafts of your manuscript on your computer and even notes and research done it would suffice. Can someone change the computer generated dates of the files? If so, I don't know why it would prove anything.

Then I was told that will not hold up in court.

It may depend on where you live. At a talk given many years ago by folks from the UK's Patents Office, they recommended the sealed, postmarked envelope method.

Can someone change the computer generated dates of the files?

Yes. But evidence of the change might be detectable by a forensic computer specialist.

AJ

Can someone change the computer generated dates of the files? If so, I don't know why it would prove anything.

Yes, but not easy to do if you want to fool a good computer forensic person. What's better is to email a copy to another person. That will provide records of the email on the mail servers as well.

The first thing you will have to prove in court is that you are the owner of the copyright. How do you plan to do that? Two people can both claim that they wrote their story in the same timeframe, but just stating that is not adequate proof in a court.

If you publish it, the publication date is considered proof. If you didn't publish, then your posting it to a site like SOL (with a posting date) would also be considered proof (though you might have trouble if you modify the story and thereby change the posting dates on either the story as a whole or individual chapters)).

@Ernest

It can get tricky if you publish under a pen-name.

Again, Amazon should have records (i.e. your tax ID number for direct deposit), or SOL would have your original owner ID and a list of your pseudonyms you could supply the courts.

Really folks, this isn't that hard!

@sejintenej

I know that in the US there are companies which do this in respect of films etc.

One VERY reliable one is Bowker (in the U.S.), where you can store your original story text along with your assigned ISBN, so you could not only prove it was your, but also the date you first wrote it (instead of merely the publication date).

@madnige

Would posting a copy to yourself be a cheaper alternative? Either a printout of a short, or a CD of a longer work, kept by you in an unopened envelope (which you'll have put some identifiers on so you know what's in it) bearing a postmark which establishes a hard date.

That used to be a reliable method (150 years ago), but nowadays, it's not difficult to modify dates and text on a computer and save it to a different device to hide the system changes. Thus it's unlikely to hold up in court. It's also a simple matter to steam open the envelop and replace the original contents with something newer.

In these matters, you have to think like both a lawyer and a criminal.

@awnlee

Yes. But evidence of the change might be detectable by a forensic computer specialist.

Not necessarily, say if you transfer the document to another device, where it would create an all-new document without the system clues.

@Ernest

Yes, but not easy to do if you want to fool a good computer forensic person. What's better is to email a copy to another person. That will provide records of the email on the mail servers as well.

Your best bet is to mail it to a lawyer. They'd know not to open or tamper with it. Then it's his word it wasn't tampered with, and most lawyers aren't willing to lie on the stand for a client because they know if they got caught, they could never practice law again.

It's also a simple matter to steam open the envelop and replace the original contents with something newer.

That may be true, however it assumes several things that may not be true:

1. If the glue joints were covered by clear 2" packing tape, the paper would probably deteriorate before the glue/adhesive releases.

2. People sometime sign their name across the glue joints. Steaming the letter open would cause the ink to run, and even if that doesn't happen, realigning the edges of the signature may be difficult.

A public performance or display of a work does not of itself constitute publication.

Maybe not, but it does document that the work is yours, and the date it was first displayed. That's enough to counter any claims by someone attempting to plagiarize your work.

A public performance or display of a work does not of itself constitute publication."

The quote is an extract from 17 U.S.C. § 101, which expands on the meaning of a public performance or display.

The copyright right of a work, be it written, song, painting etc., belongs to the creator of the work. The essence of the quote regarding publication means that distributing, performing, and displaying a work does not prove the distributor/performer/displayer is the creator.

My employment contracts assigned anything I created to my employer if my creation was related to their area of business.

From what I recall:

1. If my creation was not related to my employer's line of business, then I owned the rights to my creation. For example, my company was involved in R&D Electronics and I wrote technical documents for them. If I had written a SF story, they would not have any rights to my creation.

2. If I offered a creation related to my company's line of business to my company and they were not interested in my creation, then I owned it and I received all rights to its use.

That implies that an employee creating something holds the copyright, but hasn't it been established that something created during work time or on an employers equipment (even at home) belongs to the employer, even when it is done on break and not related to their employment skills.

Those rulings cover patents for physical inventions, not copyrights for creative content (by definition, a product of the mind). And just what 'work products' would someone use? Who brings home a typewriter from work? The days of companies buying their workers computers is gone, especially since, if they do, they typically track what you're doing while using it.

Years ago, I worked in the computer industry on Wall Street. If anyone could afford it, it would be them, and if programmers/developers had computers at home, they'd accomplish much more, yet I never received a 'work computer'. In fact, the only ones I know who do, are government workers. Do you really think a government office is going to try to submit a work to a traditional publishing company?

@REP

My employment contracts assigned anything I created to my employer if my creation was related to their area of business.

In what way are fictional stories related to anyone's 'area of business'?

The days of companies buying their workers computers is gone

That may be true where you are but it's not universal. I know many people who have company laptops, and they're expected to be able to use them at home if something needs their attention out-of-hours. Companies find it advantageous for their staff to all have compatible computers and software.

AJ

In what way are fictional stories related to anyone's 'area of business'?

They aren't. One of my companies was into direction finding and determination of a radio transmitter's location, so if I invented a way to lock onto a signal and accurately determine the transmitter's location, my company owned my invention.

That implies that an employee creating something holds the copyright, but hasn't it been established that something created during work time or on an employers equipment (even at home) belongs to the employer, even when it is done on break and not related to their employment skills.

From the link I gave earlier, which is the official glossary of the US Copyright Office:

quote

Work made for hire: "A 'work made for hire' is
—
1. a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment; or

2. a work specially ordered or commissioned for use as a contribution to a collective work, as a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, as a translation, as a supplementary work, as a compilation, as an instructional text, as a test, as answer material for a test, or as an atlas, if the parties expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire. For the purpose of the foregoing sentence, a 'supplementary work' is a work
prepared for publication as a secondary adjunct to a work by another author for the purpose of introducing, concluding, illustrating, explaining, revising, commenting upon, or assisting in the use of the other work, such as forewords, afterwords, pictorial illustrations, maps, charts, tables, editorial notes, musical arrangements,
answer material for tests, bibliographies, appendixes, and indexes, and an 'instructional text' is a literary, pictorial, or graphic work prepared for publication and with the purpose of use in systematic instructional activities."

end quote

Hell, chances are, if you've ever agreed to a software update without reading the next 30 pages of text on your phone, MicroShits probably own everything you've ever written anyway.

Apple put out a program to help people write and ready stories for use on Apple hardware, and one of the terms of the original version was you gave Apple permanent rights to whatever you wrote, and only they could give permission for it to be distributed for use on Apple hardware. I don't know if it's still in the terms or not, but it were when first released some years ago.

In most cases software is owned by the business paying the people to write it, unless someone wrote it all while not working for a company in that industry, then they own it.

This makes your program a derivative work of the compiler/development kit. You still own the copyright in your app, but (to stick with your Apple example) you can't legally distribute the app without a copyright license from Apple.

Technically, that's not the reason for the distinction. Every version of a book (print, amazon, epub, lulu, createspace) is treated as a separate entity and needs a separate ISBN. Thus you couldn't publish the Apple version anywhere else, regardless of what Apple did with it.

The text, however, is yours once you've published it. The format is something different entirely.

That has nothing to do with copyright.

You're right. It has nothing to do with copyright. But it has everything to do with why you can't publish Apples version of your story to Amazon! Apple doesn't claim copyright of your words because you publish with them (at least, not after that initial dustup over their overly broad definition of their rights), they just don't want you using their software to prepare material for other sources, and neither does anyone else! (and Apple's limitations only apply to two specific pieces of software).

However, if it is derivative of another work the copyright of which is owned by someone else, you will need a license to that copyright to legally publish it at all.

That has never been Apple's position (their badly worded initial limitation notwithstanding). Instead, they're limiting how you can use the resulting product, not the test used within the product. Thus we're talking about two separate claims, not one unified copyright claim.

That has never been Apple's position (their badly worded initial limitation notwithstanding). Instead, they're limiting how you can use the resulting product, not the test used within the product. Thus we're talking about two separate claims, not one unified copyright claim.

When they first put out the program concerned they were asked about what the terms meant, and the Apple response was anything you created in that program could not be copied into an other program to be used elsewhere, nor could you publish it for sale etc. on Apple sites unless they approved. When pushed about it they said to use it anywhere else you needed to either create the original copy in another non-Apple program and then copy it into their software to create the version compatible with their system, or you had to retype it it into another program to use it elsewhere. You weren't allowed to do a copy - paste from the Apple software to another program.

The software was for creating and preparing books for use with various Apple systems and hardware, at the time they were trying to get people to use the software to create text books and other books on the software. The software only ran on Apple hardware, and so did the finished products. I wish I could remember the name of it, but it also did a number of things to help with book productions the way Scribus and such software does.

When I looked at it I was stunned they insisted anything you created from scratch in their software program had to be totally retyped into another program if you wanted to use it outside the Apple system. The only time I heard of anyone using the Apple software they copy and pasted from another program into the Apple program to create an Apple friendly version. It was available at apple for a while, but when Apple found out it was also available elsewhere for the same price they cut the price on it, and when he objected they removed it from their site. This was some years, so i don't know what the current state of the nation is with it, but since they did it then, I don't trust them about it.

The software was for creating and preparing books for use with various Apple systems and hardware, at the time they were trying to get people to use the software to create text books and other books on the software. The software only ran on Apple hardware, and so did the finished products. I wish I could remember the name of it, but it also did a number of things to help with book productions the way Scribus and such software does.

Technically, the software wasn't 'writing' software as much as 'animation software', designed to bring 'content addition' to children's textbooks. Thus the software would pop up a dinosaur animation when discussing dinosaurs.

They weren't talking fiction at all (except for a few cases where someone might want to create a children's pop-up animated talking book, with the pop-up animations talking to the children).

The entire project mostly fizzled, and I've never heard much about it afterwards (i.e. I saw few, if any, books created using it).

My guess is, they saw a clear distinction between the two types of books and didn't want anyone trying to duplicate what they were offering on Google or Amazon (and thus they probably restricted 'copy & paste' functionality, rather than checked every book published to see if any of the text was covered in one of theirs).

Copyright protection works much better for software than patents.

Streetwise software companies take out patents on the algorithms they use in their computer programs. Not sure what use they are in certain far Eastern countries ;)

AJ

Yes, except per the patent act, mathematical algorithms (which is all a computer algorithm is) are explicitly excluded from patentable subject matter.

I've seen an office wall covered with plaques commemorating US patents for SQL queries the company used in its software.

AJ

SCOTUS is starting to push back.

That term always sounds like the official name for the President's balls. No offense to Hillary, though we'll never know since she never made it.

I think SCOTUS doesn't understand what's involved in creating a mathematical algorithm. In some cases it can take more time and effort than writing a novel. But I have to admit to a personal interest in the subject.

AJ

Nope, much as MS might like to do that, copyright transfers must be in writing and specifically name the copyrights to be transferred. Unilateral contracts can not transfer copyright ownership

Tell that to all the sites that claim 'perpetual use of any content posted to the site'. They may not technically 'own' the copyright, but they can flood the market with imitation knockoffs without paying you a cent if you ever become phenomenally successful!

They inserted the clause so they can keep the piece on their site if you abandon it, but that's not how they crafted the language.

Tell that to all the sites that claim 'perpetual use of any content posted to the site'. They may not technically 'own' the copyright, but they can flood the market with imitation knockoffs without paying you a cent if you ever become phenomenally successful!

They don't take the copyright, just the limited right to permanently use it without paying you a cent or get further permissions. The way they usually word that part of their terms of use they even have the right to sell copies to other people and don't have to pay you any royalties for it at all.

They don't take the copyright, just the limited right to permanently use it without paying you a cent or get further permissions. The way they usually word that part of their terms of use they even have the right to sell copies to other people and don't have to pay you any royalties for it at all.

Legally, that's akin to claiming they possess a 'co-copyright', allowing them to publish your stories whenever they want, under any conditions they want. They don't revoke your copyright, but because you clicked 'accept' on a website, you revoked many of the protections in your copyright protection.

That sounds pretty similar to me.

it's pointless to list all the known side effects of a drug absent any information on how likely each side effect is.

I agree 100%. Furthermore, every problem the members of the study group experiences is likely to end up on the list of side effects. There may be no proof that the symptom was caused by the drug, but the risk of losing is high in a lawsuit if it is left off.