Here’s one for the lawyers and the copyright experts.
I’m in W H Smith’s today and I notice a ‘book’ in the magazine section called Mac OS X: The Essential Manual. It’s familiar in style to another ‘book’ Highbury put out in 2004 called Creative Computing Series: Mac OS X, which was basically a compilation of articles from iCreate – quite a few of which I wrote.
So I flick through it to see if I’m right, and whaddayouknow, it’s exactly the same: a load of iCreate articles bundled together into a £10+ book. What’s more annoying than the previous book, for which I saw not a penny of thanks out of Highbury, is the fact that the articles have actually been rewritten so that all author credits have been removed. (Yet they didn’t bother correcting any of the obvious subbing mistakes. Huh.). I’m not even in the contributors section of this one, despite having written most of the main features.
I uttered some swear words to myself and put it back on the shelf. This is exactly the reason freelances are warned never to hand over copyright on their articles – publishing companies can file the serial numbers off the articles, re-use them wherever and whenever they like, and we never get so much as a thank you, let alone a cash payment – in this case, as with the Creative Computing Series volume, I didn’t even get told they were doing it. Still, beggars can’t be choosers and if you want to work for consumer IT magazines, you have to sign some pretty strict contracts.
However, it occurred to me on the way home that because of the Highbury fallout, I never got paid for most of the articles featured in the book. That means the copyright in the text of the articles still belongs to me.
Which brings me to my questions to the lawyers and copyright experts out there (and probably the NUJ’s legal branch next week):
- Since Mac OS X: The Essential Manual is ‘exclusive to WH Smith’s’ and they’re still selling it, are they infringing my copyright? Or is it still a Highbury matter?
- Can I (and any of the other unpaid iCreate freelances) sue Smith’s?
- If I/we were to do so, how much could we expect – the original fee of the article, or something greater or lesser?
Anyway, the tiny cockles of my heart are warming to the thought of getting paid for something that tried its hardest to disavow me. Once I’ve heard from the NUJ legal department (which past experience tells me can take a very, very long time and usually results in nothing but disappointment), I’ll let you – and the iCreate freelances know what I found out.