Copyright on electronic versions of printed materials

Individual permissions needed?

[stasia]

I'm working for a non-profit/educational institution. They have a relationship with a magazine publisher that we will publish on our website back issues of their magazine. (They are a really small magazine, with limited distribution.) The magazine's contact is concerned that some of the people who wrote articles/did illustrations for the magazine have not given permission for these articles/illustrations to be online accessible. (Some of these go back to 1992 and before.)

Now, if I only post the magazines in PDF form, with their published layout, included copyright, etc., how important is it to get permission from all the authors/illustrators for their work to be online? For text articles, as far as copyright goes, is there a difference if I post as PDF (in its original form) vs. posting as separate HTML articles?

Thanks for any help or resources.

[Jenstar]

Printing electronic copies of previously published pieces has been a real grey area, even when it is being re-published by the same magazine.

Your first step would be to ask the contact at the magazine to go back and see what rights the author gave the magazine for these pieces in the contract. Usually, magazines ask authors to sign a contract for use of their article, and it will specify, among other things, the rights. Hopefully it was a standard contract that was used by all authors. If the contract states the author gave all rights to the magazine, this means you can safely use these articles online. Also check the specific wording, because some contracts state that all rights will be given for a specified period only (ie. 1 year or 5 years) and then the rights revert back to the author.

Some contracts will specify electronic rights too. This is becoming more common to include electronic rights, but probably not with a small publication like this.

If one time rights only were given to the magazine, this is much trickier. Because electronic rights were often not specifically mentioned, many magazines have republished previous issues online without any further compensation to the authors, or by providing a small reprint fee to the author. But lawsuits have been brought against some magazines who have done this, who have been forced to either remove the articles or to compensate the author.

But your first step before you place anything online for the magazine is to find out exactly what rights the authors gave to the magazine in exchange for publication. And then you can ask the magazine to decide what avenue to take based upon that.

[stasia]

Thanks, Jenstar.

That's what I thought might be the case. I was hoping it could be an easy task, but it looks like permissions, or at least researching the contracts, will be a big part of getting the magazines online.

[Jenstar]

Unfortunately, when it comes down to reprinting articles electronically, even for the same publication, it never seems to be easy. And just hope they kept the contracts (or got signed contracts at all). You can always contact authors - some would be happy to see them reprinted for the byline and to add an additional writing credit to their resume.