Do Publishers Own Reprint Rights?

[ANDES LEE]

Hi,
I just want to find out whether publishers can prevent other publishers from reprinting the articles from their site, if the articles were derived in the first place from third party authors who own 100% to the articles' copyrights, but not the publishers that seek to prevent other publishers from reprinting their articles.


Now, more thoroughly:
I have seen an interesting ezine site with lots of articles for webmasters keen to look for fresh content for their sites to publish on their own sites. Unfortumately, the terms and conditions of the site limit to not more than 25 articles selected from their site for reprint by any webmaster. I wonder whether they have that level of authority, as they do not own 100% of the copyrights to those articles submitted by third-party writers. If they don't have that level of authority, they could be tricking other publishers to safeguard their own commercial interest.

A closer look on their site, at the terms of conditions for the authors, reveal that the site insists that the authors of these articles own 100% of the copyrights to those articles submitted to the site by these authors. If that is the case, wouldn't copyrights and reprint rights be synonymous with each other, or another way to put it is that the reprint rights can be authorised by the party that owns 100% to the copyrights of their articles, and so if the authors have no objections, webmasters can actually print out as many articles as they wish for their own site, even if this goes beyond the 25 articles reprint limit per year set by the earlier publisher who seems to have no ownership interests therefore to those articles. But of course, doing so would raise competing interests with the earlier publisher of the site, who are afraid of losing the regular viewers to their site to yours, if you publish the same articles as them, and therefore this requires great clearance before webmasters can safely go ahead. But intuitively, it looks like the authors can decide on the reprint rights to their articles and so, if they don't reject, I don't see why the earlier publisher can take legal action.

The site mentioned hitherto is ezinearticles.com, or more specifically, look at the excerpts in their terms below.

Please see:

1) [url]http://www.ezinearticles.com/author-terms-of-service.html[/url] for:

"EZINEARTICLES.COM TERMS OF SERVICE FOR AUTHORS:
[Printable Version]

By submitting your article(s) to us;

You declare that you are the sole owner and author of the article and own 100% of all copyrights pertaining to it."

2) [url]http://www.ezinearticles.com/terms-of-service.html[/url] for:

"EZINEARTICLES.COM TERMS OF SERVICE FOR PUBLISHERS:
[Printable Version]

Attention Publishers & Webmasters; Our Reprint Policies:

If you wish to publish/reprint any article from our site in your ezine, website, blog, forum, RSS feed or print publication, you must:

Agree to limit the number of articles reprinted to no greater than taking 25 articles from our site per calendar year per unique domain that you own.


"While EzineArticles does not generally own the copyright to the articles found within our site, we do have permission for publishing them."

Could anybody render your views on this matter? Thank you in advance for reading the issues above, and for your kind advice and suggestions.

Regards,
AndesWhat is the name of your state?What is the name of your state?

[The Occultist]

Sorry, your post was too long and I didn't care to read very much of it, but I'll post a statement and hopefully that'll help answer your question: if you agree to a contract, then you are bound to that contract regardless of whatever copyright laws you can pull out of your ass. Hope that helps!

[demartian]

The site states that you must submit something you wrote and hence you are giving THEM publishing rights to it.

Without complete information on the person submitting the information and checking each item, they really can't safely say that they own the rights to everything on there.

Legally they can SAY it but are they willing to take the chance of some poster not telling the truth and then being sued by the REAL owner?

[divgradcurl]

Do Publishers Own Reprint Rights?

It depends entirely on the agreements between the publisher and the author.

The copyright holder can own 100% of the copyright, yet still be limited by license. In your example, the copyright holder may retain 100% ownership of the copyright, but license (or grant) the publication rights (including rights to republish the material) to the ezine.

Here's an example -- you can own a house 100%, but rent it to someone else -- even thought YOU still own 100% of the house, the person renting the house has the authority -- not you -- to decide who can come in the house.

So, it all depends on what agreements exist between the copyright holder and the publisher.