Category Archives: Resources

Announcing the Authors Alliance Guide to Third-Party Permissions and How to Clear Them

Posted November 2, 2021

Today, Authors Alliance is thrilled to announce the release of a brand new educational guide for authors: Third-Party Permissions and How to Clear Them, authored and edited by Authors Alliance staff. We were inspired to create this guide, the fifth in our series of author guides, by the myriad questions we receive from authors about […]

Obtaining Image Permissions For Your Book: An Author’s Perspective

Posted October 12, 2021

Since we first published this guest post by Authors Alliance member Lois Farfel Stark in August 2018, Authors Alliance has received numerous questions from authors on clearing third-party permissions—an understandably daunting part of the publishing process. Inspired in part by this post’s perennial popularity, we are pleased to announce the upcoming release of a brand […]

Update: Fair Use in the Courts in 2021

Posted August 31, 2021

In April, we published a post on two major fair use decisions from this year: Google v. Oracle and The Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith. In the post, we expressed our uncertainty about how the decision in Google, which concerned a specific question related to software, would impact fair use analysis for literary and artistic […]

Quantifying Copyright Reversion

Posted July 20, 2021

Authors Alliance is grateful to Cory Doctorow for sharing this piece, originally published on Pluralistic.net under a CC BY license. Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, most recently Radicalized and Walkaway, science fiction for adults; How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, nonfiction about monopoly and conspiracy; […]

Online Instruction and Copyright: Why We Developed Our New FAQ

Posted June 29, 2021

Last week, we released a brand new resource on frequently asked questions regarding copyright ownership in course materials produced for online learning—the product of a semester’s worth of work by student clinicians at the Georgetown Law iPIP clinic, Elise Widerlite and Harry Levin, supervised by Amanda Levendowski and Nina Srejovic. In this week’s post, we […]

FAQ: Copyright Ownership & Online Course Materials

Posted June 22, 2021

Authors Alliance is grateful to Harry Levin and Elise Widerlite, student attorneys at Georgetown Law practicing D.C. law pursuant to D.C. App. R. 48 under the supervision of Amanda Levendowski and Nina Srejovic, for researching and authoring this FAQ. Many universities’ policies and customs provide that professors have full copyright ownership in the traditional academic […]

Spotlight on Rights Reversion & Termination of Transfer

Posted June 9, 2021

Readers familiar with Authors Alliance’s work will know that we offer a suite of resources to help authors get back the rights to their works, including information on how to revert rights by exercising a contractual provision or through negotiating with a publisher and resources on how to terminate a transfer of copyrights under U.S. […]

Rights Reversion Success Story: Benjamin Keele

Posted May 4, 2021

We recently sat down with Benjamin Keele, Research and Instructional Librarian & Lecturer in Law at Indiana University and co-author (with James Heller and Paul Hellyer) of The Librarian’s Copyright Companion (2nd Edition), to learn more about his efforts to revert rights to the book. Thanks to their successful reversion, The Librarian’s Copyright Companion is […]

Fair Use in the Courts in 2021

Posted April 20, 2021

UPDATE: In March 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari in Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith, announcing it will hear the fair use case during next year’s term. Authors Alliance will continue to monitor this case and update our readers as it moves forward. This year is shaping up to be a big one for copyright: […]

Non-Fungible Tokens, Ownership of Digital Objects, and Copyright

Posted April 13, 2021

News about non-fungible tokens (“NFTs”) selling for eye-popping sums has been hard to miss. Nyan Cat, an iconic GIF of a cat with a Pop-Tart for a torso flying through space, sold for nearly $600,000. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s first tweet—a mere five words—recently sold for nearly $3,000,000. And an NFT representing digital artist Beeple’s […]