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General Climbing Discussion

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Tassie guidebooks 17-Feb-2005 At 6:23:30 PM Ronny

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Yeah, copyright becomes complicated where there are in effect multiple authors responsible for individual bits.
Onsight's right that copyright just exists naturally in everything that's created, (unlike patents that dont exist until registered), so the key is to work out who wrote what, and whether their rights in it have been assigned to the publisher or anyone else. Also, copyright doesn't cover the idea/subject/or whatever behind the work, just the specific means of presenting it. (so anyone can paint a picture of sunflowers, but just not *that* picture of sunflowers)
Just because you publish something doesnt' mean that you have rights in it - in fact you can only publish something if you have acquired the right to do so from the copyright owner.

As I remeber it, Rock's standard letter for contributors to send in includes a specific assignment of all copyright in the work, which means that Rock can justifiably require the removal of the work/picture from websites etc.

Where this will all become interesting is in working out whether the contributor really owned the copyright in the first place. For instance if someone just gets together a bunch of route descriptions from the local area (written by other climbers), and sends it to Rock, its probably arguable that the copyright was never assigned to the mag in the first place, and remains the property of the writer.

I think its questionable whether there's copyright in a basic route description anyway. There's amost assuredly not in something basic like "go up the crack then out right past a couple of bolts."
Its the editorial/formatting/topos/pics that are really the issue.

James