The University of Iowa’s famous Writing Program is under fire from its graduate students — and the creative world at large — for its new “Open Access” philosophy of publishing creative works of its students on the internet to be found and indexed by Google and other search engines.
Few university faculty realize when they submit a paper for publication they are giving away their right to their Copyright.
Faculty
members will submit research papers to the repository often unaware
that they have signed away the rights to their work to a journal
publisher, Ms. Davis said. “They are stunned that they have not
retained the copyrights,” she said. “They’re vehemently adamant” that
they still have rights to the work.
If you buy a book, do you own that book or have you only rented the content in that book? Under the current Copyright law, you may loan that book and share that book, but you may not copy the book and give those copies to your friends or sell those copies to your enemies.
Writers can have a hard time getting paid.
Agents can help you get paid, but that isn’t always a reliable remedy.
You not getting paid means those downstream of you don’t get paid and that causes a lot of trouble for you as an author trying to eke out a living in a world that demands upfront money.
If you write words for a paper page or an electronic interface, you are cursed by the medium of publication.
Hardcopy has a limited life and is stuck in stasis. You might get paid and you might not. It costs a lot of money to print, distribute and manage paper.
Electronic publication is fleeting and febrile. You likely will not be paid. Ever. You can, however, move with the wind, revise and fix at will, and have others scrape the wealth from you in illegal republication.
One medium promise eternity while the other guarantees death.
Which is the better devil?
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