This company solicits freelance writers through various means, including Elance.com, to write how-to books. The company asks that writers compose 65,000 words within 3 months for $1,3000 or so. The work must include case studies, which are verified interviews with actual professionals. The trick is the FREELANCE CONTRACT WRITER WORK MADE FOR HIRE AGREEMENT that writers are required to sign.
The contract states that the writer will not be paid any royalties and that Atlantic Publishing Company owns the work. The contract states, Atlantic shall be the sole and exclusive owner and copyright proprietor of all rights and title in and to the Work and all results and proceeds of Writers services hereunder in whatever stage of completion. This means that the company can assign another writers name because it owns all the rights to the manuscript, and the writer will get paid nothing more than the initial $1,300, no matter how many books are sold. Furthermore, the contract states that writers are not allowed to buy the books on Amazon.com.instead, Copies of the Work may be purchased at a discount from Atlantic for personal, promotional, event, or other use where Writer is not competing against Atlantic.
For a work created by an independent contractor or freelancer to qualify as a "work made for hire, " three specific conditions found in the U.S. Copyright Act must ALL be met.
1. The work must be specially ordered or commissioned. What this means is the independent contractor is paid to create something new (as opposed to being paid for an already existing piece of work); and
2. Prior to commencement of work, both parties must expressly agree in a signed document that the work shall be considered a work made for hire; and
3. The work must fall within at least one of the following nine narrow statutory categories of commissioned works list in the Copyright Act: (1) a translation, (2) a contribution to a motion picture or other audiovisual work, (3) a contribution to a collective work (such as a magazine), (4) as an atlas, (5) as a compilation, (6) as an instructional text, (7) as a test, (8) as answer material for a test, (9) or a supplementary work (i.E., a secondary adjunct to a work by another author such as a foreword, afterword, chart, illustration, editorial note, bibliography, appendix and index).
A work is NOT work made for hire unless the work falls within one of these nine categories. An instructional text is a literary, pictorial, or graphic work prepared for publication and with the purpose of use in systematic instructional activities. The owner of the company, Douglas Brown, suggests that these work made for hire agreements are legal because his how-to books are instructional text.
What Mr. Brown is doing is taking advantage of writers by playing with the law. Many of his books are NOT actually how-to books. They are general reading, non-fiction books, which at best, could be classified as self-help. I would suggest thinking twice before getting involved with this company.
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