Where To Find My Work, Authorized And Free Of Charge
Dear friends: I received an email Tuesday that indicates Citizen’s Companion will once again re-issue my copyrighted work in the Women’s and Children’s Back to Basics special editions, without my permission or copyright transfer, and indeed, without asking me to contribute research updates or clarifications. (The Women’s and Children’s content has significant components that were given my by-line in the original run of the issues, and additional significant content that the editor and I agreed would be published without a by-line, but which are still my work.)
It seems the prior publisher grossly misrepresented the extent of their rights to my work, which had only ever been submitted with First North American Serial rights ONLY, all other rights retained by me, including the right to include my work in re-prints or digital archives. Thus, the current publisher feels they “bought” rights to my work for former editors of Citizen’s Companion, responded with such when I last contacted them about please ceasing to contravene my intellectual property rights, and it appears they will choose to stand upon that. It is not accurate, but there we are. Some folks lack ethics.
I’ve notified the current Citizen’s Companion staff several times that I do not intend to grant republication rights–and certainly not without updating the information, which is in some cases nearly 20 years old!–but the response has been less-than-encouraging for intellectual property rights. It seems they will yet again contravene my rights as an author and researcher.
However, you need not participate in such trampling, and I can offer my original and updated files in my self-archive, for free:
As always, you can find the up-to-date versions of my published work, FREE OF CHARGE, on my website, www.thesewingacademy.com , the only fully-authorized, legal repository of my own archived and updated work.
(Additionally, the staff of Citizen’s Companion persists in calling citizen-oriented vendors “sutlers”—please join me in squashing the mis-use of historical terms. Citizen-oriented makers and vendors are not sutlers. I know, it’s a small thing in the grand scheme of a publication that does not hold to a higher standard of ethics with intellectual property rights, but still. Words Mean Things.)
Fellow researchers and writers, please be sure you limit your publication efforts to self-publishing, self-archiving, or ethical publishers who operate with a simple, clear writer’s agreement. No independent writer should be handing over “all rights” to anyone, much less to a publisher that does not pay for the work. Things to consider: First North American Serial Rights that revert fully back to the author on publication; reprint rights on request only; limited or no digital archive/publication rights (outside of short teaser excerpts to advertise the periodical, perhaps); no compendium, compilation, or other omnibus publication without permission… as the creator of your own work, you have rights to it that are created with the work itself. Don’t sell yourself cheap, and don’t work with unethical publishers, full stop. It’s not worth the years-long hassle.
Yes, there are legal options. I’ve used several, and the current Citizen’s Companion publisher has a larger budget than I do defend their assumption of rights to very outdated research the magazine published up to two decades ago in some cases.
So I’m using MY right to update my own work, and share it here, free of charge. No subscription needed, no ads, no ethical issues.
An end-run around people who have less-than-stellar track records in the hobby community is rather a lot of fun. We need the cardio, right?
Hit the Compendium and the blog topic archives to your right–get my current, updated stuff, free.
