Re: Who owns copyright on old computer mags?

[crow@coos.dartmouth.edu (Preston F. Crow)]

mister_boffo@hotmail.com (Mr. Boffo) writes:

>One of the recent developments in this age of cheap storage
>is the arrival of the CD-ROM magazine archive. Some comics
>and some magazines (like MAD Magazine) are making available
>on CD-ROM the pages from all their old magazines.

>It occurs to me that there may be a market for the old
>computer magazines from the 80's which have now died out..
>Nibble, Family Computing, A+, Compute!, SofTalk, Creative
>Computing, InCider...

>I would be VERY interested in buying a CD-ROM compendium of
>all pages from these old magazines. However, I have no idea
>who owns the copyright for the old magazines, so I have no
>way of approaching this idea.

Unfortunately, it may be nigh impossible to get the copyright
permissions for reprinting even a single issue on CD-ROM.  The problem
is that many magazine contracts leave the copyrights for articles with
the authors; the magazine only bought the rights to print the article
in that one issue.  Some magazines may have done their contracts
differently, though, in which case you just have to track down who
owns the magazine now.

--PC
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