Yeah, Right

I am fortunate to be married to a very smart guy and this year we celebrate 25 years of marriage. Wahoo! Big party on the coast of Maine if you are in town.

OK, so what does this have to do with you writers and aspiring writers out there? Well, I had the good sense to marry not only a smart guy, but an attorney. And not just any attorney, but one who would go back to law school after many years of practice to get an LLM (legal mumbo jumbo for an advanced degree) in Intellectual Property Law. And this affects you -- yes, you! -- because I'm going to share something he just discovered for me. FOR FREE!

(First, let me say that it was pretty fun when the kids were small to say that Daddy was getting an IP degree. You can imagine the jokes we got to make! Hee hee.)

Anyway, back to "our" discovery. I wrote a book back in 2000 that has sold pretty well and that I revised and was released again in 2007. The other day we opened the royalty statement and lo and behold, my e-book sales had surpassed the print. My husband noted that I was being paid 15% for those books, but when he checked my contract with the publisher, it stipulated payments for books the company sold, and books the company sold to other distributors, and said any remaining or "digital rights" would be 50%. Hmmm! The other interesting thing: my contract stipulated that when this book is out of print, the rights to the book revert back to me. All rights. Obviously it was negotiated back in the day when "out of print" meant something, because there were no digital options.

In real estate we learn about the bundle of rights that can transfer with a property. There are water and air rights, rights-of-way, and other instruments that benefit a property, as well as easements, covenants, and other restrictions that can limit that bundle. In intellectual property, it's sort of the same thing. Rather than the rights to ownership of a townhouse or Queen Anne, these are the rights to property of the mind.

It's a tricky new world out there, because with each technological advance, all the boundaries shift. Keeping on top of it all is a challenge. Are you paying close attention to the bundle of creative rights you are giving away when you sign a contract? Do you really want to sign away film rights? Are you ready to give away digital rights in perpetuity? Do you have the right to reproduce parts of your story yourself?

Many of us are not legal eagles or even business types, but we need to know this stuff nonetheless. If you have questions about your rights to your published work, let me know, and I'll pass them along to my IP guy. He's very good and I happen to know where he lives.