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[GWL]: Authorship, bylines, copyrights


Margaret Lauterbach wrote:
> Seems to me that you copyright exact wording.  Someone else can use your 
> 
> idea and rephrase it in their own words, and it's not a violation of 
> copyright.  If an editor changes some words, eliminates others, etc., 
> he/she has changed the wording so someone else may copyright it.  That's 
> my 
> opinion, anyway. Margaret L

Margaret, you raise an additional interesting and related issue here.  
However, Nan's editor was not claiming her story as an original work 
written by him under his byline simply because he edited it.  He was 
simply claiming to own the copyright to her original story (under her 
byline) because he edited it.

Editing does not create an ownership position in the work unless it is 
so extensive that the story is basically coauthored by the original 
author and the editor.  In that case, the contract should show two 
authors and two names on the byline, and the copyright would be joint.  

It is true that one cannot copyright ideas.  It is both the general and 
exact wording of an article that is copyrighted, though.  If I write a 
story, another writer can read my story, then write his own story based 
upon mine, under his own byline.  If he absorbs my info and story and 
then sets it aside and writes his own, in his own words and style, this 
is legal.  He owns the copyright because he wrote his article.  It is 
legal even if 100% of the ideas and facts for his article came from 
mine.  It isn't very original, but it is legal.  

If, instead, this copycat author mostly uses my writing and just alters 
it somewhat, that is plagiarism.  He could omit and add various 
sentences and modify every sentence somewhat, even add and delete whole 
paragraphs, and it would still be plagiarism.  Generally, an edited 
manuscript would resemble the original enough so that anyone could tell 
that the one was derived from the other, and that the two are 
essentially the same expression of the art of writing that article.  If 
someone tried to claim such a modified document as his own work, he 
would be plagiarizing.

There is a corresponding situation for patents that adds a useful 
perspective.  Alterations and improvements to someone else's patents 
have legal standing.  If I create an improvement, I can patent the 
improvement.  But I don't own and have no rights to the original 
invention just because I patented an improvement.  So I can't 
manufacture my improved version unless I can liscense rights from the 
owner of the underlying basic patent.  However, my improvement is 
patented and has legal standing.  No one can use my improvement just 
because he owns or has liscensed the basic invention.  

It occurs to me that there is actually a philosophical hole in copyright 
law.  There is no legal standing for improvements on a piece of writing 
unless the writing is public domain, or unless you make specific 
arrangements with the author.  This is not a large oversight if the 
changes are minor, but changes can be massive, too.  I was actually 
involved in such a situation once.  I had written an SF story that 
wasn't strong enough to sell.  (It got turned down everywhere, so I 
knew.)   Another writer, Lee Wallingford, a fellow workshop participant, 
got turned on by the story, but had a completely different and more 
interesting idea about the protagonist.  So she and I made a deal.  She 
rewrote my story, I rewrote her rewrite, etc., until we had a story that 
was ultimately published in Asimov's SF Magazine under a joint byline.  
But we agreed to that arrangement ahead of time.  She would not have 
been able to do anything useful with an improvement to my story without 
my cooperation, even though, in this case, the improvements were 
massive.  Improvement, editing, and rewriting of literary works doesn't 
have any legal standing.  Kind of interesting.      

If a work is public domain, you can copyright a new version of it.  You 
then have rights to your version (only).  

Some magazine stories are rewritten so extensively by the editors that 
for all practical purposes, the editors are the real authors.  In most 
cases, the person who proposed the story gets the byline and legal 
ownership anyway.  Editors who pay top dollar for stories tend to expect 
the stories to come in half-way workable.  But many editors can't pay as 
much, or work with authors who aren't professional writers.  Often such 
editors are the "real" authors of many of the stories in their 
magazines.  Bylines can be somewhat mythical in meaning.  

Some bylines are more honarary than anything else.  An editor may pay a 
well-know person to "write" a story about a given topic.  Then the 
editor takes the information and writes the story from scratch, using 
the well-know person's information and byline.  The well-known person is 
not the "real" author, but actually gets both the legal ownership of the 
article and the byline for the story -- a story written entirely by 
someone else.  

There are enough stories under freelance bylines that are "really" 
written mostly by the editors so that most editors have a seriously 
cynical view about credits or clips.  Most editors really do not believe 
you are going to write them a good story that they can use without 
heroic additional writing or editing effort until you actually do it for 
them.  (Or unless they know some other editor you have worked with and 
have talked with him about you.)  

Legally, we define the legitimate author as the one who writes the 
story.  But where original information is involved, sometimes the 
correct "morally right" author is the one who did the work being 
described in the story, who may not be the same as the one who wrote it. 
 

In the scientific community, for example, valid authorship is supposed 
to reflect who thought of the work and/or who did it, and may or may not 
always reflect who wrote the paper.

Carol Deppe
Author of BREED YOUR OWN VEGETABLE VARIETIES:  THE GARDENER'S AND 
FARMER'S GUIDE TO PLANT BREEDING AND SEED SAVING (See table of contents, 
excerpts, & reviews at http://www.chelseagreen.com.)  

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