Up, up, and away! Announcing the launch of “Know Before You Sign on the Dotted Line”—our first-ever Kickstarter campaign! We’ve created this crowdfunding project to support the production of our latest educational resource, a guide to Understanding Book Publication Contracts. Signing a contract is a key step in an author’s career, but feedback from our […]
We would like to thank Creative Commons General Counsel Diane Peters for contributing the following post, which originally appeared on the Creative Commons blog on May 7 under a CC-BY license. The Creative Commons 2018 Global Summit in Toronto brought together a diverse group of stakeholders to explore strategies for increasing author choices for managing […]
Copyright registration is a claim to copyright filed with the U.S. Copyright Office which creates a public record of facts about a copyrighted work, including authorship and ownership information. Although authors do not need to register their works in order to enjoy the protection of copyright law, registration has several benefits which make it an […]
As part of our occasional Q&A series on alternative publishing models, we talked with librarian extraordinaire Jessamyn West, who successfully reverted rights to her book Without A Net, and released it under a CC-BY license on unglue.it, a website that uses crowdfunding to support the release of e-books that are made freely available by a variety […]
A key policy issue at Authors Alliance is our support for authors’ right to make fair use in the digital age. In May 2015, we participated in the U.S. Copyright Office’s sixth triennial rulemaking, and testified in support of exemptions to Section 1201 of the DMCA that would protect the fair use rights of e-book […]
The following guest post by Paul Heald describes his recent analysis of the beneficial effect of rights reversion and termination of transfer in the traditional and ebook markets. Heald is the Richard W. and Marie L. Corman Professor of Law at the University of Illinois. He is also a fellow and associated researcher at CREATe, […]
Dale Cannon is Professor Emeritus of philosophy and comparative religion at Western Oregon University. In March of 2017, he reverted rights to his religious studies textbook, Six Ways of Being Religious and made the book available under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC license in Western Oregon Library’s Digital Commons open access repository. During the past year, […]
Earlier this month, Authors Alliance attended the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference in Tampa, Florida. We presented a panel discussion on copyright basics with LeEtta Schmidt of the University of South Florida and Dave Hansen of Duke University, and staffed an information table at the conference bookfair. We were joined by UC […]
In December 2017, Authors Alliance submitted comments to the U.S. Copyright Office in support of a modified exemption to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for multimedia e-books. The proposed modification would broaden the application of the current exemption (which allows for lawful circumvention of digital rights management technologies in non-fiction works […]
What effect does fair use have on incentives to create? For some academic authors, there is growing evidence that fair use will not diminish, and may even enhance, their incentives to create and distribute scholarly works because it promotes their goals of advancing the progress of knowledge, builds reputational capital, and increases the impact of […]
