[Robyn Welsh]

Just something that has cropped up that is likely to be of interest to other fiction writers.   Should we have a copyright notice in our Amazon short story books?   Does the lack of a copyright notice compromise our rights as an author?

My book ’95 Bushels to the Acre’ doesn’t have it.  I see that Tya Dawson’s book  ‘My Name is Dog’ doesn’t have this in it. And I didn’t even think about this until I began reading Mandy Edwards’ very cool read ‘Mystery at Dead Man’s Ridge’ and spotted the copyright notice at the beginning.  If it is important, then I’ll upload new content to my site.

I’m not sure how to post this on the other forums.  Is this what the Topic Tag is all about below? Can someone help me here?  The mucky damp Auckland chill has got to my brain cells!

Thanks team.

 

[Contact NZIBS]

Interesting query, Robyn. We covered the topic of copyright in Tutorial 5 of the PAE course, but I’m not sure that I have a straight answer for you. You were, and potentially still are, the owner of the copyright of your book as you wrote it independently and without payment by a third party (e.g. if you write something whilst working for someone else, they are the owners), so you have every right to insert the copyright symbol and your name and year asserting your claim. I believe that even without asserting your claim via that symbol (the c inside a circle), you can still claim copyright.

However, and this is potentially where it becomes sticky, when you uploaded your book to Amazon did you sign/agree to Terms and Conditions, essentially agreeing to their contract? I assume you did. And in those Terms and Conditions, did you sell the the ownership of rights to Amazon. I quote from our tutorial: “A publisher who buys freelance material will assume complete rights come with the purchase, unless otherwise stated.” Sometimes only first rights are purchased, other times full rights. Incidentally, the title of your book is not covered by copyright law.

Apparently in New Zealand there is an organisation called the CLL – copyright Licensing Ltd. Again I’ve taken this directly out of our tutorial pages: http://www.copyright.co.nz. They have legal experts who give free advice, but apparently brief and to the point – no in-depth discussions.

I hope this helps you – perhaps it would be best to review your Terms & Conditions or perhaps Mandy Edwards, who you say has copyright on her Amazon book, could help clarify?

[Contact NZIBS]

And one more answer – the tags at the bottom are to help people search for old posts on a given subject. For example, I’ve added ‘Amazon’ and ‘copyright’ to these string of posts. You have to exit to the main forums list to find the search box at the top.

[Dick Ward]

My understanding of the legal position is as outlined in one of the posts above, that the writer automatically has copyright but (and here I venture into theory completely) given that Amazon is the publisher in much the same way as , for example, HarperCollins, the author should be retaining some rights. You are not selling the book to Amazon. They get their cut but you also get royalties.