by whatie

Created on: March 22, 2007   Last Updated: May 04, 2010

To recycle your writing morally and legally you need to understand what rights you are selling. There are many kinds of rights that various markets might be interested in purchasing.

The first type of rights involves what sort of privileges the buyer wants. In this area, you are granting the market the right to use your work under certain conditions. The most common conditions are:

- First rights, which means that this particular article has not appeared in this market before. In other words, this article is new and different.

- Reprint rights, which means that you have sold this article before elsewhere in this market, and this new buyer understands that and doesn't mind purchasing the article anyway.

- Exclusive rights, which means that you are not only selling first rights, but you are agreeing not to sell the article elsewhere for the duration of the exclusive period. Magazines often say things like, "Buys first rights. Exclusive for three months." - which means that you cannot sell reprint rights to anybody for three months after the publication date. An exclusive rights sale with no time limit means that you cannot sell that piece of writing again in that market, period. You retain ownership, but the buyer is the only buyer allowed to use it.

- All rights, which means that you are signing over your ownership of the writing in question. You not only cannot resell the work again, but you do not own it any more either. It belongs to the buyer lock, stock, and barrel, like a piece of property.

The second type of rights involves geography, or what part of the world these rights apply to. The various levels are:

- Local rights, which apply to a very small local area, such as a town or a section of a city - or even perhaps a whole city.

- Regional rights, which apply to a specified geographic region. A region can be any area the buyer wishes to define. Common smaller regions include a major city, a county, or an entire state. Larger regions cover sections of a country, such as, for example, the mid-Atlantic or New England.

- National rights, which cover the rights for an entire country. A periodical might ask for U.S. rights, or Japanese rights.

- Continental rights, which cover an entire continent. Most major periodicals in the U.S. and Canada ask for North American rights, while most major European periodicals ask for European rights.

- Sometimes a buyer will specify a multinational, politically-based unit. "First rights in the Arabic World" is a fairly common

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• Next Page >>