New DVDs at the Zzuperstore

[Iain]

Three new scan DVDs have been added to the Zzuperstore. They are Personal Computer Games (PCG), Commodore Horizons and Super Play. In other news, all DVD prices have been reduced to £14.99 or lower, including the new additions!!

I hope this makes Craig a little happier! Poor Mort, he'll be reduced to living on the street with his PC and scanner plugged into a lampost!

[LeeT]

More money to save up! I still haven't got the last few....

[CraigGrannell]

In other news, all DVD prices have been reduced to £14.99 or lower, including the new additions! I hope this makes Craig a little happier!

Seems like a sensible price to me. Enough to give Mort something for his efforts, but not too much to piss off publishers who own the IP.

[Mort]

Hi all,
I will be trying to get the scans uploaded onto the relevent sites, sinclair heaven should host a lot of them as they are expanding the 8bit mags beyond sinclair now!

Did the maths on the scanning work and asked Iain to reduce the prices, still less than minimum wage,but better than doing a paper round outside of work hours and it helps Iain with his cut also to keep the site open with the bandwith costs etc

[Iain]

The Superplay and Your Sinclair DVDs are no longer available from the Zzuperstore as I received an email from Future's legal department asking me to stop selling them.

It was a friendly email (none of this cease and desist crap) and they do own the copyright, so it's a fair enough request.

Maybe I should point out the similarity in name between their new magazine "Zap" and "Zzap" though?

[maf]

I guess then that those mags are consigned to history and can't be enjoyed anymore by future readers. Damn publishers and their copyright rules.

[Iain]

It would appear so, but that is their right

I did ask about the possibility of getting a licence but it appears that from 1988 onwards, publishers didn't automatically own the copyright to freelance articles, so they couldn't licence anything from 1988 onwards to us anyway

[maf]

I can see it's their copyrighted material, but it's just a real shame because the owners will never release the material again and I really wanted to see those other issues of Super Play I didn't get to read.

[Mayhem]

I did ask about the possibility of getting a licence but it appears that from 1988 onwards, publishers didn't automatically own the copyright to freelance articles, so they couldn't licence anything from 1988 onwards to us anyway

Curious... maybe that's why publishers put that stipulation in contracts now for freelancers.

(I won't go into details, but I've heard people telling me just how locked down some controls are, including losing all rights to the work and that it can be used in any way by the publisher in the future for no extra revenue on the writer's part. Merman knows whom I refer to on that specific last part at least.)

[CraigGrannell]

Most magazine publishers have lock-down clauses now, thereby enabling them to re-use material as often as they like, without paying the author any more money. Some publishers have a "rights reversion" clause, which enables the author to use/resell the unedited version of their material after a specified period of time (usually six or twelve calendar months), but plenty are now going down the "we own everything for ever! Ha!" route, sadly.

[Professor Brian Strain]

Unless it is implicity written into a contract, British magazines gain First British Serial Rights, i.e. the right to publish the article first.

Now, let's take a hypothetical example. I write an article for the antiques magazine Commode & Doormat. Someone publishes that article as their own work in a fanzine. That person has broken the copyright. Now if I as the author re-wrote the article, changed the word order and gave it a new title, it is a "new" piece which can be published elsewhere.


(And I was so busy ranting I forgot to say... no SuperPlay DVD. Boo hoo. )

[maf]

Unless the publishers plan to release a hardback or softcover compilation of those old mags I can't see why they would care about a reprint of something of no value to them any longer (other than the copyright itself).

Maybe they don't want to see or read those publications ever again, but there are lots of us who missed them first time around and want to be able to appreciate the resources and enjoy the magazine years later.

Shame on those "Scrooges".

[Iain]

Well it looks like they still own the copyright to Commodore Format as I've just been asked to remove that as well

Now, I'm upset that a Commodore mag has gone :`-( Didn't cry too much over a Speecy and SNES mag

Oh well, at least the mags have been scanned and there's a few of the dvds out there, so it shouldn't all be lost in the mists of time...

[CraigGrannell]

Unless it is implicity written into a contract

While you could perhaps get away with rewriting an article and reselling it from a legal standpoint, that action in the current martet would pretty much guarantee that (if discovered) you'd get no further work on the magazines you sold the work to.

As for Future, maybe it thinks there is value in the old IP. Or maybe it's just protecting the rights to its old material, or ensuring that it doesn't get into a legal shitstorm if some old contributor demands to know why someone is making money from their old work.

[maf]

I can understand protecting IP, but it's just really disappointing they'd let good old publications die and be forgotten.