Copyright law is complicated, and it’s really showing its signs of age now that the Internet is in common use. I have a copyright notice at the bottom of every page of this site that states that this material is covered by US copyright law, and that it may not be reproduced for any reason without my consent. I do that to protect the integrity of my work — I’ve spent hours preparing some of these articles, and I don’t want an unscrupulous person to be able to reprint my work, not attribute it to me, and then get away with it when I find out about it. Copyright law says that as the author of the work, I automatically have the right to control how it’s used. And that’s great.

I really don’t mind if my work is reprinted or used for noncommercial purposes. Every now and then, I hear from someone who’s in a writing group or who is teaching a workshop who wants to hand out my Comic Book Writer’s Guide. I need to revise it, but hey, they’re welcome to it, as long as they’re not charging anyone for it. My only stipulation is that they credit me and reference the URL of my website.

But there are loopholes in this system that allow people to use my work for commercial gain, whether I like it or not. For example, if someone wants to parody a piece of writing I’ve published, they are legally entitled to do so… so long as it’s not longer than the original piece and contains enough original writing that it’s clearly a different piece of work. If someone wants to write a biography about me and use large chunks of text from individual articles on this website, they’re permitted to do so, without my consent, under the “fair use” guidelines. (Here’s a detailed explanation of what those provide.) And if someone wants to take my work, change just enough of it that it’s original, and republish it without attributing me, they’ll probably be able to get away with it under the law, because I have to prove that they actually plagiarized my work in order to stop them from using it. That’s a problem.

And there are flaws, too. Most people who want to read my work will read my website. But what if someone wants to make a copy of an article I wrote and file it away for reference? If my copyright language does not state that they’re allowed to do so, and carries that ominous line, “All Rights Reserved,” they’re violating my copyright. The same is true if someone emails an article to a friend, or copies the article onto their own website in “mirror” fashion, with full attribution, just because they’re concerned that my site might go down and the article might be lost. Even something as benign and useful as the Wayback Machine, which archives the entire Internet, regularly violates the copyright of millions of authors without their knowledge.

To face some of the challenges presented by the information age, some folks got together about six years ago to create a “Creative Commons License” (or CCL) system that would allow writers, musicians, graphic artists, photographers, software developers, and other creative people to distribute rights from their copyrights to individual users through a free licensing system. On the surface, it seems like a really good thing for anyone to use, but it does have its own set of problems. The question I’m going to address today is whether or not a publisher should consider using a CCL for his or her printed work. The answer might surprise you.

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[The names and details in this post have been changed to protect the ignorant.]

An acquaintance of mine — let’s call him “Donny” — is excited because he just got published, and he’s asking all of his friends to buy his first book so they can support him. Donny’s always wanted to write a fantasy novel, and now he’s achieved that goal — he’s got a 206 page paperback novel available on Amazon.com and in bookstores for $24.95. He keeps telling me that if I buy a copy, he’ll sign it for me.

To which I responded… “Are you nuts?” Because I knew something about Donny’s book that he didn’t…

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100 years ago, publishing was a fairly simple affair — if you printed a book and sold it, you were the publisher. Times changed, and the copyright system altered the rules a bit: whoever was legally entitled to print the book at the discretion of the copyright holder became the publisher. And now, with the advent of the Information Age, there are even more ways to publish a book, and it’s hard for many outside the industry to know who the true publishers are!

Fortunately, there is a starting point…

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Have you ever sat down and thought about what it really means to be a “published writer?”

I can tell you what a lot of people think — they imagine a writer who lives a life of semi-luxury, flitting around during the day with no responsibilities, sitting down every now and then to bang away some piece of brilliant prose on a computer keyboard, whenever the mood strikes. The writer they imagine is an ace when it comes to dealing with publishers, a welcome sight at any bookstore and a sage when it comes to talking about the craft.

And almost none of it is true.

Part of the problem is that word “published.” It lends credibility to a writer’s work, because it implies that someone thought enough of the writing to print it and sell it. But all the word means is that a writer made a book available in printed form. It doesn’t speak about the quality, or print run, or sales, or anything else that might actually indicate a writer’s true credibility…

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