SA Writers Circle

A lot of writers produce work that looks the same – unprotected and vulnerable. The first thing that needs repair is the window, but how about some burglar guards? Surely that would prevent a potential thief from tossing hard objects through it. In terms of copyrights, we are talking about a copyright notice. Open any book on the imprint page and you will find something along the lines of: “All rights reserved” … or even, “No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher” (or something to that effect). When freelancers submit work to a publishing house, magazine or for a competition, it’s important to include a notice on the title page. You can state “All Rights Reserved” or “First S.A. Serial Rights”. In the first instance whoever receives your writing needs to ask you permission to do anything other than what they originally intended with it: If they want to record it for the radio, TV, a CD or the like, if they want to photocopy it to give to friends, family or at school and they do it without your permission, you may take legal action against them. The “First Serial Rights” refers to the fact that it is appearing in South Africa for the first time. If you should then decide to send it to England, you will state that it has “First UK Serial Rights”. This also informs magazine editors (for example) that a piece of work has appeared in print in South Africa already. So if I have sent an article to FairLady (for example) and it’s been published by them, but later I decide to send the identical article to Femina, the copyright notice will state, “Second S.A. Serial Rights”.

What writers need to understand is that the copyright notice is not “the right to copy”. I’m not giving a thief the right to break in by placing a copyright notice on my manuscript! This might have been what it was intended to mean when copyrights came into effect in England the 17^th century, but not so today. The Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978, states: “Authors of literary and artistic works protected by this Convention shall have the exclusive right of authorising the reproduction of these works, in any manner or form” (Article 9(1)). In 1992 the Copyright Amendment Act added that the Copyright Act protects literary works, musical works, artistic works, sound recordings, cinematographic films, sound and television broadcasts, programme-carrying signals, published editions and computer programs. In other words, if you are the author of these productions, you may authorise [L auctor, AUTHOR] what happens to your creation when it is presented to the public (including the translation there-of).

If you go onto the Internet, you might have heard of material that is in the “Public Domain”. This refers to material that may be used without license (or the clearing of copyrights with the publisher) after the author there-of has been dead for a certain amount of time. You just must make absolutely sure that the information you want to use is not protected by an estate. Since Herman Melville died 1891, you could use characters or other elements of  Moby Dick , but beware of Tennessee Williams! Williams’ works are protected by his estate, as I believe Sylvia Plath’s and Ted Hughes’ works are too (to name a few examples). Most copyrights of deceased published authors exist up to 70 years after their death.

Besides the violation, there is the matter of money. The only reason thieves try to get into people’s houses, is because they hope to get rich. The only reason people try to copy something beautiful you might have created is the wealth they believe they can get out of it. If a publisher wants to reproduce your work, he must pay for it since he will profit from it. The same applies to (most) magazines and newspapers. But if in all fairness you feel there isn’t a problem with someone using your work, don’t threaten legal action. Remember that as much as you might state that something is your original work, someone else might claim it and declare that it was copied. A case in point is Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code: Michael Baigent, author of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, claimed that Brown had infringed his copyrights and filed a lawsuit (which he lost in March 2007). The human mind is unique, but might not always come up with unique ideas and plagiarism could be claimed for all sorts of reasons. Check your facts before it costs you a great deal of money.

Once the police had a look at what happened at the scene of the crime, fingerprints were taken and advice was given: Install burglar guards. They might not prevent other thieves from trying again by some other means, but at least you’ve put up a sign. As authors, just put up a sign: ©I Gertenbach, and remember that not all ideas are all original. The information included here was partly original and partly obtained from Lee Wilson’s book entitled The Copyright Guide (2000) and a SATI publication entitled Rights in Practice (in particular Monica Seeber’s article on page 18).