Hatrack River Writers Workshop: Electronic excerpts and rights

This is topic Electronic excerpts and rights in forum Open Discussions About Writing at Hatrack River Writers Workshop.

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Posted by oliverhouse (Member # 3432) on :

These questions might be stupid, but I've never been one to pretend I'm all that smart.

Scenario: I'm setting up a blog on "Cutting" -- reducing the number of words needed to convey an idea, story, whatever. (You may not know it from my posts here, but I can do that. )

Does anyone know how much of a story can I publish to a Web site without affecting the author's rights?

For example, if I want to publicly publish a 1,000 word excerpt of a 10,000 word story, does that affect her rights? 1,000 of 3,000? 1,000 of 1,300? 1,000 of 1,001?

Follow-up: does it matter if the work is considered finished? In other words, if I publish the excerpt with the understanding that it will be used for criticism, and that a different, final version will be sent to a publisher, is the author under any obligation to tell the publisher that an unfinished excerpt was on a Web site?

I've looked for answers to this question, and I know we do the first 13 in order to protect rights, but I can't find a good answer to these specific questions.

Thanks,
Oliver

Posted by Jammrock (Member # 3293) on :

Technically you can't post a single sentence of a person's story on your blog without the author's permission. Assuming the story is still in copyright. Most quotes you see in book, articles and stories are used by the author's permission, or out of copyright.

Now with the author's permission, it depends on whether the story has been published or not. I'm not sure of the exact rule, because I'm sure it differs from publisher to publisher, but I would post as little of the story as possible. Maybe 2-3 sentences at a time, with no more than a tease of the story's plot or storyline worth of material (and nothing important).

Or you could take an example from an unpublishable story or make up your own from common mistakes you have seen and use that to clean up for your blog. If you do use someone's story, do not post the author's name, nor the title of the story. Keeping those two things anonymous will help hide the story from search engines. You can also change character and place names to further hide them from search engines that publisher may use to determine first publish rights.

Posted by oliverhouse (Member # 3432) on :

quote:
Technically you can't post a single sentence of a person's story on your blog without the author's permission.

I think that's not quite true, because of Fair Use laws; This Web site has a discussion of some of the issues. For our purposes, though, I'm mostly talking about excerpts from unpublished stories that people want to see get cut.

quote:
If you do use someone's story, do not post the author's name, nor the title of the story. Keeping those two things anonymous will help hide the story from search engines. You can also change character and place names to further hide them from search engines that publisher may use to determine first publish rights.

This is all good advice. Basic obfuscation would help avoid problems regardless of any official rights rulings.

Thanks,
Oliver