"Tom Quackenbush" wrote in message
...

Who holds the rights to a magazine article? I'd assume that the
magazine controls the copyright.

Very complicated, unfortunately. If you're employed by the magazine to
write, and if you have no other deal written into your contract, the
magazine owns all rights. (I suspect that George Will had some kind of
contractual deal that shared copyright, but I don't know.)

If you aren't an employee of the magazine, or if you are but you aren't one
who is *employed* to write, and if nothing else is said between you and the
publisher or his designated agent (the Editor, usually), then, when you
submit an article, you're offering First Time North American Serial Rights.
That means the magazine gets to publish it once (and you can't sell it to
someone else who's going to publish it before the first magazine publishes
it), and then the rights revert to you. The magazine usually will grab more
rights for themselves by making your cashing their check contingent upon
granting them the rest of the rights. g Or, they used to. I haven't
followed the courts on this. I haven't freelanced for most of the last
decade.

BTW, if the rights should revert to you, that doesn't mean you can reprint
the magazine article as a facsimile (a photocopy or offset copies). The
magazine retains the rights to the format and the size, placement, and
modification of any illustrations, so they effectively own their own pages.
But they can't reprint them, either, if they don't have the rights to your
copy.

Aren't you glad you asked? g

Is it subject to negotiation (I'm thinking the author may want to
have an anthology published down the road)?

Yup. You can negotiate anything. Watch out for electronic rights because
cases are still being fought in the courts over it. For now, electronic
rights appear to revert to the author, by case law, unless otherwise stated
in the contract.

Are magazine or newspaper
article copyrights the same as those for books?

They're different in default, because the book publisher has the right to
reprint. But book contracts, unlike magazine contracts, are almost always
explicit in the contract itself. And, once again, that's negotiable.

--
Ed Huntress
(remove "3" from email address for email reply)