Hi friends,
THIS IS A BIG DISCLAIMER! I AM NOT A LAWYER! THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE. IF YOU HAVE A QUESTION ABOUT YOUR OWN STUFF/PLANS, YOU SHOULD ASK AN ACTUAL INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAWYER.
You might have heard about this group of people who bought a copy of a book at an auction and thus thought they owned the copyright and intellectual property of said book. It was a LOT of money, almost three million dollars. And the book was a rare art book about a never-made sequel to the movie DUNE. This group of people, who formed a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization, or โan internet community with a bank account,โ were very, very exited about this book! They were going to make so many things out of it!


Except!!! They donโt own anything but the physical copy of the book. Apparently, no one checked with an IP lawyer about this. Maybe because they thought it was out of print (itโs a limited edition! which is not the same thing as out of print!) that it was public domain? (Out of print does not equal public domain!) Either way, they were wrong and now they have a book, and they hope they can do something with it.
This is a very extreme case of getting copyright/IP wrong. (Donโt forget, IANAL.) But I see variations of it everyday. Way back when in the early internet days, people thought that if a picture, say of a cat, was online, then it was โfair useโ and they could do what they wanted with it. In some ways, that is true. You could download it and put funny words on it and upload it again. But you donโt own it. You canโt sell it. You canโt make a movie out of it. If you want to, you have to ask the ownerโs permission. Who owns cat pictures on the internet? Most times the person who took the picture. And thatโs not an easy thing to find.
โFair useโ is not what you think it is, either. It doesnโt mean you can use a โlittle bitโ of something any way you want and not ask permission. There is no hard and fast definition of a โlittle bit.โ You can quote things, especially under the guise of โcriticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research,โ but thereโs nothing that says 25 words ok, 50 words not ok. Song lyrics and lines of poetry are treated much differently than a paragraph from a book. You can say โI like Star Trek more than Star Warsโ or โshe drank a Cokeโ in your book, but you canโt make a soda in a red can and call it Moke. (Trademarks and copyrights are two different things but you get it.)
But what about all those fairy tale retellings? you might ask. Look at the age of the original text. Itโs likely in the public domain. Didnโt you hear that The Great Gatsby entered the public domain a few years ago? Wild! You can do your Gatsby retelling to your heartโs content. But there have already been a couple so ยฏ\_(ใ)_/ยฏ. Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, and Danteโs Inferno are the most common retellings I see in my inbox. If thatโs your plan, I might suggest finding some other public domain ur-text.
But what about all those people who write Star Wars books? Those are officially licensed work for hire books and if you look at the copyright page, you will see who owns the work. It is most likely NOT the author on the front of the cover. Itโs almost certainly LucasFilm or whoever. The rights holder gave the publisher permission to find an author to write a thing. It usually works in that direction, too, not the other way around. If you are shopping your SW story to agents hoping they can help you get permission to do it, thatโs going to be an uphill climb. Itโs not impossible but itโs rare.
Never forget, that in the US, anyone can sue you for any reason, anytime. (TINLA) You donโt have to be doing something wrong to get in trouble. (Ainโt it grand?) If a rights holder sees your work and thinks itโs too close to their work, they can tell you to stop. If you want to keep going, you will likely have to hire a lawyer to argue this for you, whether it goes to court or not. The publisher does not pay for this sort of thing. When you sign a book contract, you are promising the publisher you didnโt steal it from anyone and if you donโt own it, you have permission to use it. If a publisher thinks your book is too close to someone elseโs IP, they might reject it (at the submission stage). No one wants to involve the lawyers. There are lawyers out there whose sole job is to make sure other people are not infringing on their clientsโ IP. There are many, many, many arguments to make that current copyright law is not fair, but fair has nothing to do with it at this point. If you created the most popular character in the world, would you want people making money off your idea?
Thank you for reading this very much NOT LEGAL ADVICE newsletter. I hope it inspired you to create the next most popular character in the world. There are many, many more aspects to this issue than discussed here, but I hope you all now know that just because you bought a physical book doesnโt mean you own the underlying intellectual property.
XOXOXOXOXOXOX,
Kate
I saw when this tweet viral and I was FLOORED by this. Like??? Just Google IP laws????
I know it's early, but the Dune bros thing is the funniest shiz that's happened all year. My dudes. You really bought a 3 million dollar art book for no reason.