...excerpted from a letter, 12/95
As for copyright -- it's not really a copyright problem. When you put your words into 'fixed form media', eg. write them down, they're copyrighted. They're yours, and anyone else who uses them can be sued. More practically, people are highly unlikely to steal anything of yours deliberately -- I wouldn't worry about it unless you're thinking of putting a novel on-line. I've only occasionally had reports of people putting up my stories without attribution, and they've always removed them upon request, or added attribution.
On the other hand, what you do have to worry about is publishing. When you sell a story, you generally sell (if you're American) 'first North American serial rights.' What that means is that you promise the magazine that they're the first magazine the story will appear in. This does not in any way affect anthology rights, reprint rights, movie rights, small plush animal rights, etc., and it's important to get that clear. Neither does it include electronic rights unless you specifically grant those -- but I warn you, this is a fuzzy subject and still being hashed out in the courts. Some magazines won't purchase articles/stories without electronic rights (which I would be very wary about selling), and some editors won't purchase stories that have been seen on the web, on the theory that they're already 'published' and have lost some of their value. It's up to you whether you want to risk it -- most editors do seem to realize that the web audience and their print readership is very different, and are perfectly willing to purchase stories that have been on a home page. In my own experience, several editors have contacted me directly as a result of seeing my work on the web, so web publishing has been very profitable and rewarding for me.
Click here to read more authoritative stuff about
signing away electronic rights (and why you should be very very careful...).
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