Giving Away Your Copy Right

When you join a publishing site you will be requested to accept the Terms of Service.  99% of all people accept without reading the TOS (or Terms of Use, TOU).   This is a very bad idea.  It is so bad it goes off the bad scale.

To accept terms you haven’t read makes you an easy victim of all sorts of abuse; from having your work ‘stolen’ to losing your copyright, to standing by and seeing your work get credit for others.

This is a story I believe is true.  I came across it some years ago, and knowing the site, and the habit of users NOT reading the Terms of Service, I am not shocked.

There was a site which invited users to submit their work and it seemed more a kind of ‘workshop’ than publishing site.   A lot of people would publish a short story, get comments.   There were contests on occasion as well.

One of these contests was to write a short story about… (I don’t recall the exact terms, let us say) “… a woman who encounters a man she secretly loved twenty years ago, who doesn’t remember her…”

I have never been much for ‘free work’.  I read a lot of the submissions, made helpful comments, (I hope they were helpful) and moved on.

I don’t know exactly who won or what went on as I forgot about the site.

When I came back there I got a private message, (which had been sent long ago) from a woman who told me that she had written a short story and submitted it.   She didn’t win anything.    Then she was watching television and her story was presented as an episode in…(serial).   She was totally distraught because she received not one cent.

Now imagine watching NCIS or Elementary or Blue Bloods or whatever episodic show you watch, and seeing a story you wrote presented.

She contacted the site and was told that she had signed over her copyright.  The site owned her work.

The site saw her work, one of the owners took it, submitted it, got Paid for it, and put the money in his/her right pocket.  The writer got NOTHING.

The reason this has popped into my mind today is due to this email I got from a site called ‘Expertscolumn”.  If you don’t belong to it, Nah bodda…(Don’t bother).   It’s a pathetic excuse for a publishing site.  It has this great trick of making $5.00 the ‘threshold’ and playing with your views so that you never get there.   It once had a bit of a rating but is on the verge of collapse.

Having gone there I recalled a site I used many years ago at the same time I joined Expertscolunm.   The site was called ‘Seekyt’.   I wondered what happened to the site, so I went there.

The site is still up, BUT DOESN’T PAY.   You can submit your work, but you won’t get paid.  Further, and more significantly. you give the Site your copyright.   That’s right.   In the Terms of Service you give away your copyright to all work.

You get nothing for your work, and the site gets everything.

I sat and looked a the various contributions, wondering how stupid people could be to join a site that didn’t pay.  AND took your copyright.

Hopefully, Seekyt won’t sell your work, but hey!  They own it!  They can do what they want!

Read the Terms of Service before you join a site is the moral.