Legalities

Ask Me Anything: Compiling Letters

Christiana Aretta asks, How about some advice for someone compiling a journal of old letters? Licensing, copyright issues, etc. The big question when publishing a letter is whether or not you have permission: if you wrote or received the letter, the situation is very different than if the letters aren’t yours. The best option is [...]

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SFWA’s Election: Non-members Actually Care

SFWA, for those of us who don’t rely on fiction to earn our bread, is Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, an organization for published genre authors. Some pretty big names are involved, from Ursula K. LeGuin to George R. R. Martin (big if you’re into sci fi and fantasy, anyhow). SFWA has an [...]

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A good copyright reference

I’m one of those odd people who actually enjoys crawling all over the U.S. Copyright Office’s website, looking for that little bit of information that I want. However, I know I’m in the minority, so I’d like to point you to one of the best introductions to copyright that I’ve run across: The Copyright Handbook: [...]

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The Copyright Series: Creative Commons

Creative Commons licensing was developed with the idea that U.S. copyright is too extensive. Creative Commons works are typically found online, and are often licensed as such so that users can simply share the licensed material with no intervention. For instance, if I declared one of my short stories to be Creative Commons, you could [...]

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Next Week: The Copyright Series

Copyright is complex enough, I know. But it seems like every week, someone comes out with some brilliant fix to all the ills of modern copyright law. Creative Commons, copyleft, Founder’s copyright. None of them seem to make much sense, and it’s hard to tell just how valuable they might be to freelance writers. Well, [...]

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