Death, Publishers, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Probate Court When the owner of a publishing firm dies, what happens to the intellectual property rights of the individual authors whose works were purchased and publish by the firm? The simple answer is they become not the property of the author, but the assets of the owner’s estate, which is subject to settlement by the Probate Court. A sole proprietorship is what anyone can have who files their income tax using the small business Schedule C form under their social security number. It requires no other official documentation. IF Publishing, owned by Irene Black, is such an entity and has existed for nearly twenty years. E-books have made this form of publishing venture attractive in recent years. The only things an individual needs to start their business are a computer and a group of ISBN numbers (10 for $250) registered with Bowker . Plus a working knowledge of the various platforms formats used in the e-world. Then y...

Botswana’s Copyright Law and How it’s Killing Writers By Lauri Kubuitsile I got a message from someone that a school had photocopied one of my books for their students. I called the Copyright Society of Botswana (COSBOTS) and the helpful lady there told me that they couldn’t do much for me even if they had started registering members (which they haven’t yet) because the law allows the photocopying of books for educational purposes. The copyright law in Botswana is relatively new, passed in 2000, and COSBOTS only set up last year. The part of the new law on photocopying of books for educational purposes is shockingly vague. Basically it says they can, it does not include any parameters. This is the problem. Botswana is a small country, 1.8 million people. In Botswana, there are no trade publishers. All of the publishers in Botswana are educational publishers. There are a handful of locally owned publishers who must fight it out with the big internationals. Before the establishment ...

All posts at the Blood-Red Pencil are copyright of the author listed at the end of the post. If you are interested in copying portions of the text, please leave a comment for the author to contact you. Be professional and respectful and do not simply scrape an entire good essay for your own blog. This is stealing and it's a copyright infringement, which is illegal. Some of our blogging team is retired and rich and just might turn it over to their attorneys. We've just discovered a blogger who has scraped post after post from our site. Not at all cool. Here's a link to the Copyright Office if you need more information about what and how much you can quote.