Keep Your Copyrights - helping authors avoid abusive contracts

Keep Your Copyrights encourages authors to avoid abusive contracts and copyright agreements with their publishers by providing easy-to-undertand legal information about copyright issues.

A creator forewarned is a creator forearmed. This site is devoted to all authors and creators of works in the United States. It aims to make clear why you might want to keep your copyrights, and to provide information both to help you hold on to your rights and to grant on reasonable terms the rights you do license.

We encourage a more proactive attitude toward copyright management. We encourage creators to understand that you start with all the rights, and that you should actively decide what you want to do with them. Your copyright in fact consists of multiple rights, and you can grant one right (or part of one right) without giving away the others. Copyright was designed to serve artists and creators, but if you give everything up, that idea can just become lip service. Worse, if you give away too many rights, the business to whom you gave up your rights can use your copyrights against you to hinder your later efforts to create or to get paid.

Link (via BoingBoing)