When an article is bought and rights

[SHRED]

I just had my first magazine article published. There was no pay involved.

Now where can I research copyright issues?

I know nothing about when of if I can shop my article(s) around or what the difference between a paying and freebie article would be regarding who or how many magazines can publish them.

I heard that if you get paid for an article then the paying party owns publishing rights. In other words, you can only get paid once and then it is out of your hands. Is this true?

[eyesroll]

1. Did you sign a contract?

The contract should specify. It varies by publication. Some magazines buy first rights, some magazines buy all rights -- and pay doesn't necessarily change things.

I edit a trade magazine, and we use articles in two ways. The vast majority of articles we use, whether bought for cash, traded for advertising space or just for the publicity, we acquire all North American publishing rights, in any medium, in perpetuity. This enables us to put the article online, sell the rights to it to someone else, re-print it in another magazine -- and it also ensures it won't appear in a competing magazine.

On very rare occasions, we'll buy non-exclusive rights. These are usually freebies, written by consultants about generic business topics. This allows us to print the article in the magazine (and usually on our Web site) but they can shop it elsewhere. We do not do this with commissioned articles, ever.

I am not sure, absent a contract, what the presumption is -- I would assume you're entitled to the rights to your work, but I really don't know. Check the publication's copyright statement -- if there's a "all written pieces copyright their respective owners"-type disclaimer, then the article should be yours.

Good luck.

[Nay]

2. When you were accepted for publication, the publisher's letter

should have detailed the rights it wanted in the letter. They can ask for one-time rights, North American rights, all rights, etc. Since no pay was involved, it would be pretty presumptuous of them to ask for all rights, IMO. IIRC, one-time rights means you can sell the article again to anyone you want. If they buy all rights, yes, it means they own it forever and can print it anytime, anywhere without out compensating you further.

So, what did the acceptance letter say?

[SHRED]

3. No letter involved

This was done very informally through email.
I know an editor, who works with the magazine, and he contacted me asking if I would write an article, which I did. It is a very small scale mag at this point. They only have 3 issues published but they are fully funded by their advertisers.
He told me they had "first rights" and that I could shop it around after they published it, which they have already.
I have never written anything but songs, poetry, and internet discussion threads. Now that I am considering article writing, I wanted to learn more about getting paid and the publishing rights ramifications.

[TreasonousBastard]

5. Oh, OK...

was writing my first reply while this cam through.

You're fine if they only got first-time rights, but note that this devalues the article when you try to sell it. Nobody pays much for something that's already seen print unless you're famous, and even then they don't pay top dollar.

Not to worry, though, it gets worse. You'll have article ideas, submit them to publications, get a huge stack of rejection form letters if you hear from them at all, and eventually sell one and then haunt them forever trying to get paid.

Keep at it, and don't get discouraged. Everyone went through this.

[TreasonousBastard]

4. Depends...

upon what rights you gave up when they accepted the article. Since they didn't pay you, you should still own the copyright without any argument.

When a publication buys an article, you negotiate to the extent you can what rights they are buying. More and more of them are trying to buy all the rights, and not just the one-time rights that let you keep the copyright.

There's a nasty trend toward buying "works for hire" which means that if they buy exclusive rights, they don't have to pay you royalties if they resell the article.

You can start researching at http://www.nwu.org/ but copyright becomes a pretty complicated issue with all the new law and the consolidation of the publishing industry.