Copyright Works Made for Hire…

Some Really Stupid Stuff Being Said…

A lot to do with the Anthropic settlement. Seems you get a bunch of writers who know nothing of copyright worrying about getting money from a copyright settlement, things can just get stupid.

Actually, the rule is pretty simple. And frighteningly enough, the courts have been moderately clear.

To have a work made for hire, you have to either have worked in the office under the companies control with payroll and such, or signed a Works Made for Hire Contract and fall into nine very clearly defined categories, 95% of which authors do not fit in for fiction.

Here is the link to the pdf from the copyright office that is very, very clear.

https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ30.pdf

So as some publishers are trying to claim 100% ownership in the Anthropic settlement because it was a works made for hire contract, well, nope.

Authors, you just want proof that traditional publishers were never out to help you in any way, the publisher’s actions in this settlement should give it to you. I got a publisher that did not even buy my first novel in 1987 trying to claim half ownership of it, even though the novel went out of print in 1990 and was reverted in 1992 and in 2012 I licensed it to WMG and it has been in print ever since through WMG. Yup no scum move there, huh?

5 Comments

Marsha

September 11, 2026 at 6:14 am Reply

Dean,

I’m curious about why you licensed your novel to WMG. What advantage do you gain from that step instead of just publishing it yourself? Is it an advantage for the corporation (WMG) or do you do it for your personal finances?

I’m assuming it’s the same as licensing a short story to a magazine. Just trying to understand the advantages.

Thanks, Marsha

dwsmith

September 12, 2026 at 2:20 am Reply

Marsha, WMG is mine and Kris’s company. And yes, corporations are always to help with the money and cash flow. And yes, the license agreement is at arms length as the call it for standard novel purchase prices for a reprint. WMG is a C corporation. It does not own my copyright, I only license it.

C.E. Petit

September 12, 2026 at 6:35 pm Reply

One quibble and… well, protect your screens first before reading beyond the next paragraph.

The quibble is that what Dean said is correct for contracts and other transfers signed on or after January 1, 1978. Prior to that, it was possible to do by contract what the publishers want to believe they can still do, because the work-made-for-hire doctrine was not in the statute at all — it was a judge-made doctrine that made sense in some contexts but not in others. For example, the very first Star Wars novelization could have been a work made for hire if its contract stated so, because the contract was signed in early 1977 prior to the film’s initial release. The novelization of The Empire Strikes Back… not so much.

I warned you about potential screen damage if you read further:

There are much, much worse actors than “the publishers” in the improper-work-made-for-hire realm, and some of them are active in the Anthropic settlement. The most obvious one is hinted at in the quibble: Media companies that want novelizations (and “sandbox stuff” — Dean has explained that before at greater length, it’s shorthand for “playing in another writer’s/creator’s sandbox” like all those Star Wars and Star Trek novels not based on a prior media production) to be, in the words of a typical two-year-old, mineminemineMINE. They do not have a copyright claim. Even the claim that “It’s a derivative work from our property!” fails, because all that does is require permission to publish the derivative work and they already gave that. Any claim that they might have rests in trademark and other varieties of unfair competition — a cause of action explicitly excluded from the Anthropic settlement.

Sadly, media companies aren’t the only bad actors misclaiming work-made-for-hire. Believe it or not, some of the worst offenders are universities, concerning staff/professor/even student writing outside the scope of their work — the serial-numbers-carefully-filed-off engineering professor who writes westerns in his spare time, the political science grad student who writes romance novels, the (nontenured!) music instructor who writes political conspiracy thrillers. (None of those are made up.) It’s a closer call when within scope of employment, like the criminology professor who writes a true-crime book — but if that book is for trade and not for academia (with footnotes and arrows and 29 glossy 8×10 photographs shrunk and stuffed into a “plates” section at the end of a 6×9 paperback), there can probably at most be a transfer of the copyright (reversible after 35 years), not a work made for hire.

The real problem with the work-made-for-hire doctrine is that it defines as the author what a late-eighteenth-century Member of Society would have called the patron. Not cool.